Combining Planning and Motion Planning

Abstract

Robotic manipulation is important for real, physical world
applications. General Purpose manipulation with a robot (eg.
delivering dishes, opening doors with a key, etc.) is demanding.
It is hard because (1) objects are constrained in position
and orientation, (2) many non-spatial constraints interact
(or interfere) with each other, and (3) robots may have multidegree
of freedoms (DOF). In this paper we solve the problem
of general purpose robotic manipulation using a novel
combination of planning and motion planning. Our approach
integrates motions of a robot with other (non-physical or
external-to-robot) actions to achieve a goal while manipulating
objects. It differs from previous, hierarchical approaches
in that (a) it considers kinematic constraints in configuration
space (C-space) together with constraints over object manipulations;
(b) it automatically generates high-level (logical) actions
from a C-space based motion planning algorithm; and
(c) it decomposes a planning problem into small segments,
thus reducing the complexity of planning.