UNCLE-Grasp: Uncertainty-Aware Grasping of Leaf-Occluded Strawberries

arXiv:2601.14492v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Robotic strawberry harvesting is challenging under partial occlusion, where leaves induce significant geometric uncertainty and make grasp decisions based on a single deterministic shape estimate unreliable. From a single partial observation, multiple incompatible 3D completions may be plausible, causing grasps that appear feasible on one completion to fail on another. We propose an uncertainty-aware grasping pipeline for partially occluded strawberries that explicitly models completion uncertainty arising from both occlusion and learned shape reconstruction. Our approach uses point cloud completion with Monte Carlo dropout to sample multiple shape hypotheses, generates candidate grasps for each completion, and evaluates grasp feasibility using physically grounded force-closure-based metrics. Rather than selecting a grasp based on a single estimate, we aggregate feasibility across completions and apply a conservative lower confidence bound (LCB) criterion to decide whether a grasp should be attempted or safely abstained. We evaluate the proposed method in simulation and on a physical robot across increasing levels of synthetic and real leaf occlusion. Results show that uncertainty-aware decision making enables reliable abstention from high-risk grasp attempts under severe occlusion while maintaining robust grasp execution when geometric confidence is sufficient, outperforming deterministic baselines in both simulated and physical robot experiments.