Grasp-Oriented Non-Prehensile Manipulation via Learning a Graspability Field
2026-06-29 • Robotics
Robotics
AI summaryⓘ
The authors studied how robots can better prepare objects for grasping without needing to know the exact final position beforehand. Instead of aiming for one set pose, they taught the robot to make the object easier to grasp by measuring how 'graspable' different positions are. They use this measure to guide the robot’s movements until the object is ready to be picked up. Tests showed their method works well both in simulations and with a real robot, and the graspability measure matches how well the robot actually succeeds at grasping.
non-prehensile manipulationrobotic graspinggraspabilityreinforcement learningclosed-loop controlobject configurationpolicy learninggrasp successmanipulation-to-grasp pipeline
Authors
Licheng Zhong, Gim Hee Lee
Abstract
Non-prehensile manipulation is often used as a preparatory step for robotic grasping, yet existing approaches typically require a predefined target object pose. In practice, however, objects admit multiple graspable configurations and the desired pose is not known in advance. We reformulate non-prehensile manipulation for grasping as optimizing an object centric graspability objective rather than reaching a specific pose. We construct a graspable set from synthesized grasps and define a graspability field that measures how suitable an object configuration is for successful grasp execution. The scalar measure provides a dense learning signal for reinforcement learning and determines when to terminate manipulation. This yields a closed-loop manipulation-to-grasp pipeline driven by a single policy. Experiments in simulation and on a real robot show that the policy reliably reconfigures objects into graspable states and transitions to grasping without external planners or manually specified stopping conditions. The predicted graspability distance correlates with real world grasp success, which indicates that the learned representation captures grasp feasibility of object configurations.