# Robotic Grasping of Fully-Occluded Objects using RF Perception

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.15436 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15436/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 31 Dec 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Play it by Ear: Learning Skills amidst Occlusion through Audio-Visual Imitation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14850/) (2022)
- [OmniVLA: Physically-Grounded Multimodal VLA with Unified Multi-Sensor Perception for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.01210/) (2025)
- [Large Model for Small Data: Foundation Model for Cross-Modal RF Human Activity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.19766/) (2024)
- [Find the Fruit: Zero-Shot Sim2Real RL for Occlusion-Aware Plant Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16547/) (2025)
- [Camera-RFID Fusion for Robust Asset Tracking in Forested Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.26241/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present the design, implementation, and evaluation of RF-Grasp, a robotic system that can grasp fully-occluded objects in unknown and unstructured environments. Unlike prior systems that are constrained by the line-of-sight perception of vision and infrared sensors, RF-Grasp employs RF (Radio Frequency) perception to identify and locate target objects through occlusions, and perform efficient exploration and complex manipulation tasks in non-line-of-sight settings. RF-Grasp relies on an eye-in-hand camera and batteryless RFID tags attached to objects of interest. It introduces two main innovations: (1) an RF-visual servoing controller that uses the RFID's location to selectively explore the environment and plan an efficient trajectory toward an occluded target, and (2) an RF-visual deep reinforcement learning network that can learn and execute efficient, complex policies for decluttering and grasping. We implemented and evaluated an end-to-end physical prototype of RF-Grasp. We demonstrate it improves success rate and efficiency by up to 40-50% over a state-of-the-art baseline. We also demonstrate RF-Grasp in novel tasks such mechanical search of fully-occluded objects behind obstacles, opening up new possibilities for robotic manipulation. Qualitative results (videos) available at rfgrasp.media.mit.edu