A manipulation planner for pick and place operations under continuous grasps and placements
Thierry Siméon, Juan Cortés, Anis Sahbani, J.-P. Laumond · 2003
This paper addresses the manipulation planning problem which deals with motion planning for robots manipulating movable objects among static obstacles. We propose a manipulation planner capable of handling continuous domains for modeling both the possible grasps and the stable placements of a single movable object, rather than discrete sets generally assumed by the existing planners. The algorithm relies on a topological property that characterizes the existence of solutions in the subspace of configurations where the robot grasps the object placed at a stable position. This property leads to reduce the problem by structuring the search-space. It allows us to devise a manipulation planner that directly captures in a probabilistic roadmap the connectivity of sub-dimensional manifolds of the composite configuration space. First experiments demonstrate the feasibility and the efficiency of the approach.