An Optimization Approach to Planning for Mobile Manipulation - Robotics Institute Carnegie Mellon University

An Optimization Approach to Planning for Mobile Manipulation

Dmitry Berenson, Howie Choset, and James Kuffner
Conference Paper, Proceedings of (ICRA) International Conference on Robotics and Automation, pp. 1187 - 1192, May, 2008

Abstract

We present an optimization-based approach to grasping and path planning for mobile manipulators. We focus on pick-and-place operations, where a given object must be moved from its start configuration to its goal configuration by the robot. Given only the start and goal configurations of the object and a model of the robot and scene, our algorithm finds a grasp and a trajectory for the robot that will bring the object to its goal configuration. The algorithm consists of two phases: optimization and planning. In the optimization phase, the optimal robot configurations and grasp are found for the object in its start and goal configurations using a co-evolutionary algorithm. In the planning phase, a path is found connecting the two robot configurations found by the optimization phase using Rapidly-Exploring Random Trees (RRTs). We benchmark our algorithm and demonstrate it on a 10 DOF mobile manipulator performing complex pick-and-place tasks in simulation.

BibTeX

@conference{Berenson-2008-9952,
author = {Dmitry Berenson and Howie Choset and James Kuffner},
title = {An Optimization Approach to Planning for Mobile Manipulation},
booktitle = {Proceedings of (ICRA) International Conference on Robotics and Automation},
year = {2008},
month = {May},
pages = {1187 - 1192},
keywords = {mobile manipulation, genetic algorithms, path planning, grasping},
}