A Single Planner for a Composite Task of Approaching, Opening and Navigating through Non-spring and Spring-loaded Doors

Abstract

Opening and navigating through doors remains a challenging problem, particularly in cluttered environments and for spring-loaded doors. Passing through doors, especially
spring-loaded doors, requires making and breaking contacts with the door and preventing the door from closing while passing through. In this work, we present a planning framework that handles non-spring and spring-loaded doors, in cluttered or confined workspaces, planning the approach to the door, pushing or pulling it open, and passing through. Because the problem is solved in a combined search space, the planner yields an overall least-cost path. The planner is able to insert a transition between robot-door contacts at any point along the plan. We utilize a compact graph-based representation of the problem to keep planning times low. We precompute the force workspace of the end-effectors to eliminate checks against joint torque limits at plan time. We have validated our solution in both simulation and real-world experiments on the PR2 mobile manipulation platform; the robot is able to successfully open a variety of spring-loaded and non-spring-loaded doors by pushing and pulling.