HTC-Grasp: A Hybrid Transformer-CNN Architecture for Robotic Grasp Detection

Accurately detecting suitable grasp areas for unknown objects through visual information remains a challenging task. Drawing inspiration from the success of the Vision Transformer in vision detection, the hybrid Transformer-CNN architecture for robotic grasp detection, known as HTC-Grasp, is developed to improve the accuracy of grasping unknown objects. The architecture employs an external attention-based hierarchical Transformer as an encoder to effectively capture global context and correlation features across the entire dataset. Furthermore, a channel-wise attention-based CNN decoder is presented to adaptively adjust the weight of the channels in the approach, resulting in more efficient feature aggregation. The proposed method is validated on the Cornell and the Jacquard dataset, achieving an image-wise detection accuracy of 98.3% and 95.8% on each dataset, respectively. Additionally, the object-wise detection accuracy of 96.9% and 92.4% on the same datasets are achieved based on this method. A physical experiment is also performed using the Elite 6Dof robot, with a grasping accuracy rate of 93.3%, demonstrating the proposed method's ability to grasp unknown objects in real scenarios. The results of this study indicate that the proposed method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods.