Pushing Fast and Slow: Task-Adaptive Planning for Non-prehensile Manipulation Under Uncertainty
This addresses the challenge of efficient and reliable robotic manipulation in uncertain environments, representing an incremental improvement in adaptive planning methods.
The paper tackles the problem of non-prehensile manipulation under uncertainty by proposing a task-adaptive planning and control approach that adjusts motion speed based on accuracy requirements, enabling a robot to maintain high success rates while completing tasks as fast as possible in simulation and real-world experiments.
We propose a planning and control approach to physics-based manipulation. The key feature of the algorithm is that it can adapt to the accuracy requirements of a task, by slowing down and generating `careful' motion when the task requires high accuracy, and by speeding up and moving fast when the task tolerates inaccuracy. We formulate the problem as an MDP with action-dependent stochasticity and propose an approximate online solution to it. We use a trajectory optimizer with a deterministic model to suggest promising actions to the MDP, to reduce computation time spent on evaluating different actions. We conducted experiments in simulation and on a real robotic system. Our results show that with a task-adaptive planning and control approach, a robot can choose fast or slow actions depending on the task accuracy and uncertainty level. The robot makes these decisions online and is able to maintain high success rates while completing manipulation tasks as fast as possible.