A manipulation planner for pick and place operations under continuous grasps and placements

This paper addresses the manipulation planning problem which deals with motion planning for robots manipulating movable objects among static obstacles. We propose a manipulation planner capable of handling continuous domains for modeling both the possible grasps and the stable placements of a single movable object, rather than discrete sets generally assumed by the existing planners. The algorithm relies on a topological property that characterizes the existence of solutions in the subspace of configurations where the robot grasps the object placed at a stable position. This property leads to reduce the problem by structuring the search-space. It allows us to devise a manipulation planner that directly captures in a probabilistic roadmap the connectivity of sub-dimensional manifolds of the composite configuration space. First experiments demonstrate the feasibility and the efficiency of the approach.