Rearrangement Planning via Heuristic Search

Abstract: We present a method to apply heuristic search algorithms to solve rearrangement planning by pushing problems. In these problems, a robot must push an object through clutter to achieve a goal. To do this, we exploit the fact that contact with objects in the environment is critical to goal achievement. We dynamically generate goal-directed primitives that create and maintain contact between robot and object at each state expansion during the search. These primitives focus exploration toward critical areas of state-space, providing tractability to the high-dimensional planning problem. We demonstrate that the use of these primitives, combined with an informative yet simple to compute heuristic, improves success rate when compared to a planner that uses only primitives formed from discretizing the robot's action space. In addition, we show our planner outperforms RRT-based approaches by producing shorter paths faster. We demonstrate our algorithm both in simulation and on a 7-DOF arm pushing objects on a table.