Pick and place planning for dual-arm manipulators

This paper proposes a method for planning the pick-and-place motion of an object by dual-arm manipulators. Our planner is composed of the offline and the online phases. The offline phase generates a set of regions on the object and the environment surfaces and calculates several parameters needed in the online phase. In the online phase, the planner selects a grasping pose of the robot and a putting posture of the object by searching for the regions calculated in the offline phase. By using the proposed method, we can also plan the trajectory of the robot, and the regrasping strategy of the dual-arm. Here, the putting posture of the object can be planned by considering stability of the object placed on the environment. The effectiveness of the proposed method is confirmed by simulation and experimental results by using the dual-arm robot NX-HIRO.