Learning a Pre-Grasp Manipulation Policy to Effectively Retrieve a Target in Dense Clutter

Robotic grasping of a target object in cluttered environments poses considerable challenges, often due to limited collision-free grasp affordances caused by the close proximity of other objects. To overcome this limitation, non-prehensile actions like pushing can be strategically employed to manipulate the environment and improve the chances of successful grasps. In this paper, we introduce a novel pre-grasp manipulation policy designed to efficiently retrieve a target object from dense clutter by leveraging pushing actions and considering the gripper’s kinematic capabilities to strategically position the target object within the gripper’s closing region for a secure grasp. Unlike conventional approaches, our policy incorporates sequential pushing, allowing the robot to make decisions while within the camera’s field of view without retracting to a home position, leading to significantly reduced execution time per action. Our policy, trained in simulation, seamlessly transfers to real-world scenarios. Extensive experimental evaluation demonstrates superior performance, faster completion times, and robust generalization to unseen objects compared to existing baselines.