Planning Stacking Operations With an Unknown Number of Objects

Abstract

Abstract:A planning framework is proposed for the task of cleaning a table and stack an unknown number of objects of different size on a tray. We propose to divide this problem in two, and combine two different planning algorithms. One, plan hand motions in the euclidean space to be able to move the hand in a noisy scenario using a novel Time-of-Flight camera (ToF) to perform the perception of the environment. The other one, chooses the strategy to effectively clean the table, considering the symbolic position of the objects, and also its size for stacking considerations. Our formulation does not use information about the number of objects available, and thus is general in this sense. Also, it can deal with different object sizes, planning adequately to stack them. The special definition of the possible actions allows a simple and elegant way of characterizing the problem, and is one of the key ingredients of the proposed solution. Some experiments are provided in simulated and real scenarios that validate our approach.