A Certified-Complete Bimanual Manipulation Planner
This addresses the challenge of bimanual manipulation planning for robots, particularly in complex environments like furniture assembly, though it appears incremental in its certification approach.
The paper tackles the problem of planning motions for two robot arms to collaboratively move an object by proposing a certified-complete algorithm that guarantees finding a solution if one exists, and it was tested on large furniture pieces in both software and hardware.
Planning motions for two robot arms to move an object collaboratively is a difficult problem, mainly because of the closed-chain constraint, which arises whenever two robot hands simultaneously grasp a single rigid object. In this paper, we propose a manipulation planning algorithm to bring an object from an initial stable placement (position and orientation of the object on the support surface) towards a goal stable placement. The key specificity of our algorithm is that it is certified-complete: for a given object and a given environment, we provide a certificate that the algorithm will find a solution to any bimanual manipulation query in that environment whenever one exists. Moreover, the certificate is constructive: at run-time, it can be used to quickly find a solution to a given query. The algorithm is tested in software and hardware on a number of large pieces of furniture.