Search-based planning for manipulation with motion primitives

Heuristic searches such as A* search are highly popular means of finding least-cost plans due to their generality, strong theoretical guarantees on completeness and optimality and simplicity in the implementation. In planning for robotic manipulation however, these techniques are commonly thought of as impractical due to the high-dimensionality of the planning problem. In this paper, we present a heuristic search-based manipulation planner that does deal effectively with the high-dimensionality of the problem. The planner achieves the required efficiency due to the following three factors: (a) its use of informative yet fast-to-compute heuristics; (b) its use of basic (small) motion primitives as atomic actions; and (c) its use of ARA* search which is an anytime heuristic search with provable bounds on solution suboptimality. Our experimental analysis on a real mobile manipulation platform with a 7-DOF robotic manipulator shows the ability of the planner to solve manipulation in cluttered spaces by generating consistent, low-cost motion trajectories while providing guarantees on completeness and bounds on suboptimality.