Keypoint-GraspNet: Keypoint-Based 6-DoF Grasp Generation from the Monocular RGB-D Input

The success of 6-DoF grasp learning with point cloud input is tempered by the computational costs result- ing from their unordered nature and pre-processing needs for reducing the point cloud to a manageable size. These properties lead to failure on small objects with low point cloud cardinality. Instead of point clouds, this manuscript explores grasp generation directly from the RGB-D image input. The approach, called Keypoint-GraspNet (KGN), operates in perception space by detecting projected gripper keypoints in the image, then recovering their SE(3) poses with a PnP algorithm. Training of the network involves a synthetic dataset derived from primitive shape objects with known continuous grasp families. Trained with only single-object synthetic data, Keypoint-GraspNet achieves superior result on our single-object dataset, comparable performance with state-of-art baselines on a multi-object test set, and outperforms the most competitive baseline on small objects. Keypoint-GraspNet is more than 3x faster than tested point cloud methods. Robot experiments show high success rate, demonstrating KGN’s practical potential.