Incorporating Object Intrinsic Features Within Deep Grasp Affordance Prediction

Robotic grasping systems often rely on visual observations to drive the grasping process, where the robot must be able to detect and localize an object, extract features relevant to the task, and then combine this information to plan a manipulation strategy. But what happens when some of the most impactful features are not observed by the robot? Without context on an objects center-of-mass, for example, a robot may make assumptions such as uniform density that do not hold, and which may in turn guide the robot into perceiving a sub-optimal set of grasping configurations. In this work, we examine how having prior knowledge of an object's intrinsic properties influences the task of dense grasp affordance prediction. We investigate a simple, constrained grasping task where object properties heavily regulate the space of successful grasps, and further evaluate how learning is affected when generalizing across unseen weight configurations and unseen object shapes.