Autonomous Object Detection and Grasping Using Deep Learning for Design of an Intelligent Assistive Robot Manipulation System

Assistive robot solutions are mostly designed as robot helpers with robotic arms and aim to assist disabled and elderly people with carrying out basic activities of daily life such as reaching household objects, i.e. cups, feeding with spoon, opening a drawer/fridge doors, etc., However, commercial assistive robotic arms with joystick control require extensive and tiring hand motor skill training that limits robot's practical usage by patients with disabilities. The main objective of this work is to present the methodology for designing an intelligent human-machine interface for a commercial joystick controlled assistive robotic arm realizing shared autonomy and supervisory control modes. Preliminary results on a RGB-D based object detection and position estimation system development using publicly available YOLOv3 and CenterNet deep learning models implementation of an autonomous object grasping mode by the Kinova Jaco robotic arm are described in detail and experimentally demonstrated.