Summer Research Intern, Centre for Artificial Intelligence & Robotics (CAIR), DRDO

Jun – Jul 2022

I worked at DRDO for 2 months in the months from June to July 2022 under the guidance of Scientist ‘D’ Mr. Ramachandra Kodi.

My topic for the internship was “Multi-Grasp Arm Manipulation” where a single arm was used to manipulate varied size objects using multiple grasping positions. The idea was to get the best grasping location for such objects and extend it to Dual-Arm setup.

The project was carried out in simulation using ROS, Gazebo. To generate 3D Point Clouds, Open3D was utilized. MoveIt was used for trajectory planning and 6D Pose of an object with multiple grasping positions/possibilities were determined using GraspNet.

Key contributions:

• Integrated ROS and MoveIt functionality for a custom-made manipulator in the simulation environment.
• Checked the feasibility of the GraspNet framework for obtaining multiple effective 6D poses of an object for object pose estimation.

Through this internship, I noted two insights:

• Existing Grasping related works focus on end-effector perspective and does not consider manipulator configurations or constraints. Generating grasping dataset with different arms could improve in understanding the limitations of the end-effectors and performances for different object shapes.
• Predicting the full shape of the object could improve the robustness of grasping using AI based 3D content generation techniques