Knowledge-Based Grasp Planning Using Dynamic Self-Organizing Network

Category-based methods for task-specified grasp planning have recently been proposed in the literature. Such methods, however, are normally time consuming in both training and grasp determination process and lack capabilities to improve grasping skills due to the fixed training data set. This paper presents an improved approach for knowledge-based grasp planning by developing a multi-layer network using self-organizing map. A number of grasp candidates are learned in the experiments and the information that is associated with these grasp candidates is clustered based on different criteria on each network layer. A codebook which is composed of a small number of generalized models and the corresponding task-oriented grasps is generated from the network. In addition, the proposed network is capable of automatically adjusting its size so that the codebook can be continuously updated from each interaction with the novel objects. In order to increase the accuracy and convergence rate of the clustering process, a new initialization method is also proposed. Simulation results present the advantages of the proposed initialization method and the auto-growing algorithm in terms of accuracy and efficiency over some conventional methods. Experimental results demonstrate that novel objects can be successfully grasped in accordance with desired tasks using the proposed approach.