Abstract
The ability to build structures with autonomous robots using only found, minimally processed stones would be immensely useful, especially in remote areas. Assembly planning for dry-stacked structures, however, is difficult since both the state and action spaces are continuous, and stability is strongly affected by complex friction and contact constraints. We propose a planning algorithm for such assemblies that uses a physics simulator to find a small set of feasible poses and then evaluates them using a hierarchical filter. We carefully designed the heuristics for the filters to match our goal of building stable, free-standing walls. These plans are then executed open-loop with a robotic arm equipped with a wrist RGB-D camera. Experimental results show that the proposed planning algorithm can significantly improve the state of the art in robotic dry stacking.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Hironori Yoshida and Dr. Marco Hutter for their valuable input regarding the comparison algorithm, and Jackie Chan for scanning the stones. This work was partially supported by NSF Grant #1846340 and the SMART CoE at UB.
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Liu, Y., Choi, J., Napp, N. (2021). Planning for Robotic Dry Stacking with Irregular Stones. In: Ishigami, G., Yoshida, K. (eds) Field and Service Robotics. Springer Proceedings in Advanced Robotics, vol 16. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-9460-1_23
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-9460-1_23
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