Efficient and Robust Training of Dense Object Nets for Multi-Object Robot Manipulation

We propose a framework for robust and efficient training of Dense Object Nets (DON) [1] with a focus on industrial multi-object robot manipulation scenarios. DON is a popular approach to obtain dense, view-invariant object descriptors, which can be used for a multitude of downstream tasks in robot manipulation, such as, pose estimation, state representation for control, etc. However, the original work [1] focused training on singulated objects, with limited results on instance-specific, multi-object applications. Additionally, a complex data collection pipeline, including 3D reconstruction and mask annotation of each object, is required for training. In this paper, we further improve the efficacy of DON with a simplified data collection and training regime, that consistently yields higher precision and enables robust tracking of keypoints with less data requirements. In particular, we focus on training with multi-object data instead of singulated objects, combined with a well-chosen augmentation scheme. We additionally propose an alternative loss formulation to the original pixel wise formulation that offers better results and is less sensitive to hyperparameters. Finally, we demonstrate the robustness and accuracy of our proposed framework on a real-world robotic grasping task.