A Supervisory Learning Control Framework for Autonomous & Real-time Task Planning for an Underactuated Cooperative Robotic task

Abstract: We introduce a framework for cooperative manipulation, applied on an underactuated manipulation problem. Two stationary robotic manipulators are required to cooperate in order to reposition an object within their shared work space. Control of multi-agent systems for manipulation tasks cannot rely on individual control strategies with little to no communication between the agents that serve the common objective through swarming. Instead a coordination strategy is required that queries subtasks to the individual agents. We formulate the problem in a Task And Motion Planning (TAMP) setting, while considering a decomposition strategy that allows us to treat the task and motion planning problems separately. We solve the supervisory planning problem offline using deep Reinforcement Learning techniques resulting into a supervisory policy capable of coordinating the two manipulators into a successful execution of the pick-and-place task. Additionally, a benefit of solving the task planning problem offline is the possibility of real-time (re)planning, demonstrating robustness in the event of subtask execution failure or on-the-fly task changes. The framework achieved zero-shot deployment on the real setup with a success rate that is higher than 90%.