Generation of Synthetic AI Training Data for Robotic Grasp-Candidate Identification and Evaluation in Intralogistics Bin-Picking Scenarios

Abstract

Robotic bin picking remains a main challenge for the wide enablement of industrial robotic tasks. While AI-enabled picking approaches are encouraging they repeatedly face the problem of data availability. The scope of this paper is to present a method that combines analytical grasp research with the field of synthetic data creation to generate individual training data for use-cases in intralogistics transportation scenarios. Special attention is given to systematic grasp finding for new objects and unknown geometries in transportation bins and to match the generated data to a real two-finger parallel gripper. The presented approach includes a grasping simulation in Pybullet to investigate the general tangibility of objects under uncertainty and combines these findings with a previously reported virtual scene generator in Blender, which generates AI-images of fully packed transport boxes, including depth maps and necessary annotations. This paper, therefore, contributes a synthesizing and cross-topic approach that combines different facets of bin-picking research such as geometric analysis, determination of tangibility of objects, grasping under uncertainty, finding grasps in dynamic and restricted bin-environments, and automation of synthetic data generation. The approach is utilized to generate synthetic grasp training data and to train a grasp-generating convolutional neural network (GG-CNN) and demonstrated on real-world objects.