Bimanual Shelf Picking Planner Based on Collapse Prediction

Abstract: In logistics warehouse, since many objects are randomly stacked on shelves, it becomes difficult for a robot to safely extract one of the objects without other objects falling from the shelf. In previous works, a robot needed to extract the target object after rearranging the neighboring objects. In contrast, humans extract an object from a shelf while supporting other neighboring objects. In this paper, we propose a bimanual manipulation planner based on collapse prediction trained with data generated from a physics simulator, which can safely extract a single object while supporting the other object. We confirmed that the proposed method achieves more than 80% success rate for safe extraction by real-world experiments using a dual-arm manipulator.