To grasp or not to grasp: an end-to-end deep-learning approach for predicting grasping failures in soft hands

This paper tackles the challenge of predicting grasp failures in soft hands before they happen, by combining deep learning with a sensing strategy based on distributed Inertial Measurement Units. We propose two neural architectures, which we implemented and tested with an articulated soft hand - the Pisa/IIT SoftHand - and a continuously deformable soft hand - the RBO Hand. The first architecture (Classifier) implements a-posteriori detection of the failure event, serving as a test-bench to assess the possibility of extracting failure information from the discussed input signals. This network reaches up to 100% of accuracy within our experimental validation. Motivated by these results, we introduce a second architecture (Predictor), which is the main contribution of the paper. This network works on-line and takes as input a multi-dimensional continuum stream of raw signals coming from the Inertial Measurement Units. The network is trained to predict the occurrence in the near future of a failure event. The Predictor detects 100% of failures with both hands, with the detection happening on average 1.96 seconds before the actual failing occurs - leaving plenty of time to an hypothetical controller to react.