A Case-Based Approach to Mobile Push-Manipulation

The complexity of the potential physical interactions between the robot, each of the pushable objects, and the environment is vast in realistic mobile push-manipulation scenarios. This makes it non-trivial to write generic analytical motion and interaction models or tune the parameters of physics engines for every robot, object, and environment combination. We present a case-based approach to push-manipulation that allows the robot to acquire, through interaction and observation, a set of discrete, experimental, probabilistic motion models (i.e. probabilistic cases) for pushable passively-mobile real world objects. These probabilistic cases are then used as building blocks for constructing achievable push plans to navigate the object of interest to the desired goal pose as well as to potentially push the movable obstacles out of the way in cluttered task environments. Additionally, incremental acquisition and updating of the probabilistic cases allows the robot to adapt to the changes in the environment, such as increased mass due to loading of the object of interest for transportation purposes. The purely interaction and observation driven nature of our method makes it robot, object, and environment (real or simulated) independent, as we demonstrate through validation tests in a real world setup in addition to extensive experimentation in simulation.