Robotic grasp detection using extreme learning machine

Object grasping using vision is one of the important functions of manipulators. Machine learning based methods have been proposed for grasp detection. However, due to the variety of grasps and 3D shapes of objects, how to effectively find the best grasp is still a challenging issue. Thus this paper presents an extreme learning machine (ELM) based method to cope with this issue. This proposed method consists of three successive modules, including candidate object detection, estimation of object´s major orientations and grasp detection. In the first module, candidate object region is extracted based on depth information. In the second module, object´s major orientations guide the directions for sliding windows. In the third module, a cascaded classifier is trained to identify the right grasp. ELM is used as the base classifier in the cascade. Histograms of oriented gradients (HOG) are used as features. Experimental results in benchmark dataset and real manipulators have shown that this proposed method outperforms other methods in terms of accuracy and computational efficiency.