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Rigid-Soft Interactive Learning for Robust Grasping

Inspired by widely used soft fingers on grasping, we propose a method of rigid-soft interactive learning, aiming at reducing the time of data collection. In this paper, we classify the interaction categories into Rigid-Rigid, Rigid-Soft, Soft-Rigid according to the interaction surface between grippers and target objects. We find experimental evidence that the interaction types between grippers and target objects play an essential role in the learning methods. We use soft, stuffed toys for training, instead of everyday objects, to reduce the integration complexity and computational burden and exploit such rigid-soft interaction by changing the gripper fingers to the soft ones when dealing with rigid, daily-life items such as the Yale-CMU-Berkeley (YCB) objects. With a small data collection of 5K picking attempts in total, our results suggest that such Rigid-Soft and Soft-Rigid interactions are transferable. Moreover, the combination of different grasp types shows better performance on the grasping test. We achieve the best grasping performance at 97.5\% for easy YCB objects and 81.3\% for difficult YCB objects while using a precise grasp with a two-soft-finger gripper to collect training data and power grasp with a four-soft-finger gripper to test.