Coordinate Invariant User-Guided Constrained Path Planning with Reactive Rapidly Expanding Plane-Oriented Escaping Trees

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel real-time motion planning method for robots that leverages a single human demonstration, respecting geometric constraints and incorporating reactive collision avoidance, applicable to complex tasks and different robot configurations.

Contribution

The paper presents a new approach combining screw linear interpolation with reactive collision avoidance, enabling generalization from a single demonstration to complex tasks and different robot structures.

Findings

Effective in dynamic environments for stacking and pouring tasks

Generalizes from single demonstration to complex multi-step tasks

Works across different robot kinematic structures

Abstract

As collaborative robots move closer to human environments, motion generation and reactive planning strategies that allow for elaborate task execution with minimal easy-to-implement guidance whilst coping with changes in the environment is of paramount importance. In this paper, we present a novel approach for generating real-time motion plans for point-to-point tasks using a single successful human demonstration. Our approach is based on screw linear interpolation,which allows us to respect the underlying geometric constraints that characterize the task and are implicitly present in the demonstration. We also integrate an original reactive collision avoidance approach with our planner. We present extensive experimental results to demonstrate that with our approach,by using a single demonstration of moving one block, we can generate motion plans for complex tasks like stacking multiple blocks (in a dynamic environment). Analogous generalization abilities are also shown for tasks like pouring and loading shelves. For the pouring task, we also show that a demonstration given for one-armed pouring can be used for planning pouring with a dual-armed manipulator of different kinematic structure.