Coordination of two robotic manipulators for object retrieval in clutter

TL;DR

This paper presents a coordination method for two robotic manipulators to efficiently retrieve objects from cluttered spaces by maximizing robot turn-taking, reducing mission completion time.

Contribution

It introduces an optimal coordination algorithm based on uniform-cost search and a greedy variant to improve retrieval efficiency in cluttered environments.

Findings

Method reduces mission time by at least 22.9%.

Optimal coordination maximizes robot turn-taking.

Proposed approach outperforms non-coordination methods.

Abstract

We consider the problem of retrieving a target object from a confined space by two robotic manipulators where overhand grasps are not allowed. If other movable obstacles occlude the target, more than one object should be relocated to clear the path to reach the target object. With two robots, the relocation could be done efficiently by simultaneously performing relocation tasks. However, the precedence constraint between the tasks (e.g, some objects at the front should be removed to manipulate the objects in the back) makes the simultaneous task execution difficult. We propose a coordination method that determines which robot relocates which object so as to perform tasks simultaneously. Given a set of objects to be relocated, the objective is to maximize the number of turn-takings of the robots in performing relocation tasks. Thus, one robot can pick an object in the clutter while the other robot places an object in hand to the outside of the clutter. However, the object to be relocated may not be accessible to all robots, so taking turns could not always be achieved. Our method is based on the optimal uniform-cost search so the number of turn-takings is proven to be maximized. We also propose a greedy variant whose computation time is shorter. From experiments, we show that our method reduces the completion time of the mission by at least 22.9% (at most 27.3%) compared to the methods with no consideration of turn-taking.