PokeRRT: Poking as a Skill and Failure Recovery Tactic for Planar Non-Prehensile Manipulation

TL;DR

PokeRRT introduces poking as an effective non-prehensile manipulation skill for fast object manipulation and failure recovery, expanding a robot's workspace and improving success rates over pushing and grasping.

Contribution

This work presents PokeRRT, a novel motion planning algorithm that leverages poking for manipulation and failure recovery, demonstrating its effectiveness in various environments and scenarios.

Findings

Poking increases the robot's reachable workspace.

Poking outperforms pushing and grasping in success rate.

Poking reduces task completion time.

Abstract

In this work, we introduce PokeRRT, a novel motion planning algorithm that demonstrates poking as an effective non-prehensile manipulation skill to enable fast manipulation of objects and increase the size of a robot's reachable workspace. We showcase poking as a failure recovery tactic used synergistically with pick-and-place for resiliency in cases where pick-and-place initially fails or is unachievable. Our experiments demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed framework in planning object trajectories using poking manipulation in uncluttered and cluttered environments. In addition to quantitatively and qualitatively demonstrating the adaptability of PokeRRT to different scenarios in both simulation and real-world settings, our results show the advantages of poking over pushing and grasping in terms of success rate and task time.