Predicting Motion Plans for Articulating Everyday Objects
This addresses the problem of efficient motion planning for robots in everyday tasks, though it is incremental as it builds on existing learning and simulation approaches.
The paper tackles the challenge of generating motion plans for mobile manipulation tasks with articulated objects in novel environments by learning from past experience, resulting in improved speed and accuracy compared to search-based and pure learning methods.
Mobile manipulation tasks such as opening a door, pulling open a drawer, or lifting a toilet lid require constrained motion of the end-effector under environmental and task constraints. This, coupled with partial information in novel environments, makes it challenging to employ classical motion planning approaches at test time. Our key insight is to cast it as a learning problem to leverage past experience of solving similar planning problems to directly predict motion plans for mobile manipulation tasks in novel situations at test time. To enable this, we develop a simulator, ArtObjSim, that simulates articulated objects placed in real scenes. We then introduce SeqIK+$θ_0$, a fast and flexible representation for motion plans. Finally, we learn models that use SeqIK+$θ_0$ to quickly predict motion plans for articulating novel objects at test time. Experimental evaluation shows improved speed and accuracy at generating motion plans than pure search-based methods and pure learning methods.