A Survey on Learning-Based Robotic Grasping

Purpose of Review This review provides a comprehensive overview of machine learning approaches for vision-based robotic grasping and manipulation. Current trends and developments as well as various criteria for categorization of approaches are provided. Recent Findings Model-free approaches are attractive due to their generalization capabilities to novel objects, but are mostly limited to top-down grasps and do not allow a precise object placement which can limit their applicability. In contrast, model-based methods allow a precise placement and aim for an automatic configuration without any human intervention to enable a fast and easy deployment. Summary Both approaches to robotic grasping and manipulation with and without object-specific knowledge are discussed. Due to the large amount of data required to train AI-based approaches, simulations are an attractive choice for robot learning. This article also gives an overview of techniques and achievements in transfers from simulations to the real world.