Similar Part Rearrangement in Cluttered Environments

This work proposes a method for effectively computing manipulation paths to rearrange similar objects in a cluttered space. The solution can be used to place similar products in a factory floor in a desirable arrangement or for retrieving a particular object from a shelf blocked by similarly sized objects. These are challenging problems as they involve combinatorially large, continuous configuration spaces. This work proposes graphical tools to quickly reason whether manipulation paths allow the transition between entire sets of object arrangements without having to explicitly store the path for each pair of arrangements. The proposed method also allows to take advantage of precomputation given a manipulation roadmap. The resulting approach is evaluated for scalability and success ratio in simulation for a realistic model of a Baxter robot and executed in open-loop on the real system.