When Transformer Meets Robotic Grasping: Exploits Context for Efficient Grasp Detection

In this letter, we present a transformer-based architecture, namely TF-Grasp, for robotic grasp detection. The developed TF-Grasp framework has two elaborate designs making it well suitable for visual grasping tasks. The first key design is that we adopt the local window attention to capture local contextual information and detailed features of graspable objects. Then, we apply the cross window attention to model the long-term dependencies between distant pixels. Object knowledge, environmental configuration, and relationships between different visual entities are aggregated for subsequent grasp detection. The second key design is that we build a hierarchical encoder-decoder architecture with skip-connections, delivering shallow features from the encoder to decoder to enable a multi-scale feature fusion. Due to the powerful attention mechanism, TF-Grasp can simultaneously obtain the local information (i.e., the contours of objects), and model long-term connections such as the relationships between distinct visual concepts in clutter. Extensive computational experiments demonstrate that TF-Grasp achieves competitive results versus state-of-art grasping convolutional models and attains a higher accuracy of 97.99 and 94.6% on Cornell and Jacquard grasping datasets, respectively. Real-world experiments using a 7DoF Franka Emika Panda robot also demonstrate its capability of grasping unseen objects in a variety of scenarios.