A pushing-grasping collaborative method based on deep Q-network algorithm in dual viewpoints

In the field of intelligent manufacturing, robot grasping and sorting is important content. However, there are some disadvantages in the traditional single-view-based manipulator grasping methods by using a 2D camera, where the efficiency and the accuracy of grasping are both low when facing the scene of stacking and occlusion for the reason that there is information missing by single-view 2D camera-based methods while acquiring scene information, and the methods of grasping only can’t change the difficult-to-grasp scene which is stack and occluded. Regarding the issue above, a pushing-grasping collaborative method based on the deep Q-network in dual viewpoints is proposed in this paper. This method in this paper adopts an improved deep Q-network algorithm, with an RGB-D camera to obtain the information of objects’ RGB images and point clouds from two viewpoints, which solved the problem of lack of information missing. What’s more, it combines the pushing and grasping actions with the deep Q-network, which make it have the ability of active exploration, so that the trained manipulator can make the scenes less stacking and occlusion, and with the help of that, it can perform well in more complicated grasping scenes. In addition, we improved the reward function of the deep Q-network and propose the piecewise reward function to speed up the convergence of the deep Q-network. We trained different models and tried different methods in the V-REP simulation environment, and it drew a conclusion that the method proposed in this paper converges quickly and the success rate of grasping objects in unstructured scenes raises up to 83.5%. Besides, it shows the generalization ability and well performance when novel objects appear in the scenes that the manipulator has never grasped before.