Multi-robot geometric task-and-motion planning for collaborative manipulation tasks

We address multi-robot geometric task-and-motion planning (MR-GTAMP) problems in synchronous, monotone setups. The goal of the MR-GTAMP problem is to move objects with multiple robots to goal regions in the presence of other movable objects. We focus on collaborative manipulation tasks where the robots have to adopt intelligent collaboration strategies to be successful and effective, i.e., decide which robot should move which objects to which positions, and perform collaborative actions, such as handovers. To endow robots with these collaboration capabilities, we propose to first collect occlusion and reachability information for each robot by calling motion-planning algorithms. We then propose a method that uses the collected information to build a graph structure which captures the precedence of the manipulations of different objects and supports the implementation of a mixed-integer program to guide the search for highly effective collaborative task-and-motion plans. The search process for collaborative task-and-motion plans is based on a Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) exploration strategy to achieve exploration-exploitation balance. We evaluate our framework in two challenging MR-GTAMP domains and show that it outperforms two state-of-the-art baselines with respect to the planning time, the resulting plan length and the number of objects moved. We also show that our framework can be applied to underground mining operations where a robotic arm needs to coordinate with an autonomous roof bolter. We demonstrate plan execution in two roof-bolting scenarios both in simulation and on robots.

Automated summary

In this paper, we propose a solution for multi-robot geometric task-and-motion planning problems. Our approach collects occlusion and reachability information for each robot and builds a graph structure to guide the search for highly effective collaborative task-and-motion plans. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms other methods in terms of planning time, plan length, and number of objects moved, and can be applied to underground mining operations.