MOPL: A multi-modal path planner for generic manipulation tasks

For intelligent robots to solve real-world tasks, they need to manipulate multiple objects, and perform diverse manipulation actions apart from rigid transfers, such as pushing and sliding. Planning these tasks requires discrete changes between actions, and continuous, collision-free paths that fulfill action-specific constraints. In this work, we propose a multi-modal path planner, named MOPL, which accepts generic definitions of primitive actions with different types of contact manifolds, and randomly spans its search trees through these subspaces. Our evaluation shows that this generic search technique allows MOPL to solve several challenging scenarios over different types of kinematics and tools with reasonable performance. Furthermore, we demonstrate MOPL by solving and executing plans in two real-world experimental setups.