Simultaneous Multi-View Object Recognition and Grasping in Open-Ended Domains

A robot working in human-centric environments needs to know which kind of objects exist in the scene, where they are, and how to grasp and manipulate various objects in different situations to help humans in everyday tasks. Therefore, object recognition and grasping are two key functionalities for such robots. Most state-of-the-art tackles object recognition and grasping as two separate problems while both use visual input. Furthermore, the knowledge of the robot is fixed after the training phase. In such cases, if the robot faces new object categories, it must retrain from scratch to incorporate new information without catastrophic interference. To address this problem, we propose a deep learning architecture with augmented memory capacities to handle open-ended object recognition and grasping simultaneously. In particular, our approach takes multi-views of an object as input and jointly estimates pixel-wise grasp configuration as well as a deep scale- and rotation-invariant representation as outputs. The obtained representation is then used for open-ended object recognition through a meta-active learning technique. We demonstrate the ability of our approach to grasp never-seen-before objects and to rapidly learn new object categories using very few examples on-site in both simulation and real-world settings.