Visual scoping operations for physical assembly
This work addresses computational efficiency in planning algorithms for physical assembly tasks, representing an incremental improvement over existing methods.
The paper tackled the problem of reducing computational overhead in planning with subgoals for physical assembly, proposing visual scoping as a method that interleaves planning and acting, achieving comparable task performance to a subgoal planner with significantly lower computational cost.
Planning is hard. The use of subgoals can make planning more tractable, but selecting these subgoals is computationally costly. What algorithms might enable us to reap the benefits of planning using subgoals while minimizing the computational overhead of selecting them? We propose visual scoping, a strategy that interleaves planning and acting by alternately defining a spatial region as the next subgoal and selecting actions to achieve it. We evaluated our visual scoping algorithm on a variety of physical assembly problems against two baselines: planning all subgoals in advance and planning without subgoals. We found that visual scoping achieves comparable task performance to the subgoal planner while requiring only a fraction of the total computational cost. Together, these results contribute to our understanding of how humans might make efficient use of cognitive resources to solve complex planning problems.