AdaptPNP: Integrating Prehensile and Non-Prehensile Skills for Adaptive Robotic Manipulation
This addresses a key bottleneck in robotics for enabling more general-purpose manipulation capabilities, though it appears incremental as an integration of existing methods.
The paper tackles the challenge of creating a unified framework for robotic manipulation that integrates both prehensile (grasping) and non-prehensile (e.g., pushing) skills, introducing AdaptPNP, a vision-language model-based system that achieves adaptive multi-step planning across diverse tasks and environments.
Non-prehensile (NP) manipulation, in which robots alter object states without forming stable grasps (for example, pushing, poking, or sliding), significantly broadens robotic manipulation capabilities when grasping is infeasible or insufficient. However, enabling a unified framework that generalizes across different tasks, objects, and environments while seamlessly integrating non-prehensile and prehensile (P) actions remains challenging: robots must determine when to invoke NP skills, select the appropriate primitive for each context, and compose P and NP strategies into robust, multi-step plans. We introduce ApaptPNP, a vision-language model (VLM)-empowered task and motion planning framework that systematically selects and combines P and NP skills to accomplish diverse manipulation objectives. Our approach leverages a VLM to interpret visual scene observations and textual task descriptions, generating a high-level plan skeleton that prescribes the sequence and coordination of P and NP actions. A digital-twin based object-centric intermediate layer predicts desired object poses, enabling proactive mental rehearsal of manipulation sequences. Finally, a control module synthesizes low-level robot commands, with continuous execution feedback enabling online task plan refinement and adaptive replanning through the VLM. We evaluate ApaptPNP across representative P&NP hybrid manipulation tasks in both simulation and real-world environments. These results underscore the potential of hybrid P&NP manipulation as a crucial step toward general-purpose, human-level robotic manipulation capabilities. Project Website: https://adaptpnp.github.io/