# Uncertainty-Aware Self-Supervised Target-Mass Grasping of Granular Foods

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.12946 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.12946/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 27 May 2021.

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Dynamic-Resolution Model Learning for Object Pile Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16700/) (2023)
- [Imitation Learning for Nonprehensile Manipulation through Self-Supervised Learning Considering Motion Speed](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10289/) (2022)
- [Cluttered Food Grasping with Adaptive Fingers and Synthetic-Data Trained Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05187/) (2022)
- [Manipulation of Granular Materials by Learning Particle Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.02274/) (2021)
- [GAM-Depth: Self-Supervised Indoor Depth Estimation Leveraging a Gradient-Aware Mask and Semantic Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14354/) (2024)
- [Understanding Particles From Video: Property Estimation of Granular Materials via Visuo-Haptic Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02119/) (2024)
- [Few-shot Scooping Under Domain Shift via Simulated Maximal Deployment Gaps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02949/) (2024)
- [Learning to Push, Group, and Grasp: A Diffusion Policy Approach for Multi-Object Delivery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.08452/) (2025)
- [VERAGMIL: Virtual Environment for Scooping Granular Foods with Imitation Learning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.18258/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Food packing industry workers typically pick a target amount of food by hand from a food tray and place them in containers. Since menus are diverse and change frequently, robots must adapt and learn to handle new foods in a short time-span. Learning to grasp a specific amount of granular food requires a large training dataset, which is challenging to collect reasonably quickly. In this study, we propose ways to reduce the necessary amount of training data by augmenting a deep neural network with models that estimate its uncertainty through self-supervised learning. To further reduce human effort, we devise a data collection system that automatically generates labels. We build on the idea that we can grasp sufficiently well if there is at least one low-uncertainty (high-confidence) grasp point among the various grasp point candidates. We evaluate the methods we propose in this work on a variety of granular foods -- coffee beans, rice, oatmeal and peanuts -- each of which has a different size, shape and material properties such as volumetric mass density or friction. For these foods, we show significantly improved grasp accuracy of user-specified target masses using smaller datasets by incorporating uncertainty.