Repulsive Trajectory Modification and Conflict Resolution for Efficient Multi-Manipulator Motion Planning

We propose an efficient motion planning method designed to efficiently find collision-free trajectories for multiple manipulators. While multi-manipulator systems offer significant advantages, coordinating their motions is computationally challenging owing to the high dimensionality of their composite configuration space. Conflict-Based Search (CBS) addresses this by decoupling motion planning, but suffers from subsequent conflicts incurred by resolving existing conflicts, leading to an exponentially growing constraint tree of CBS. Our proposed method is based on repulsive trajectory modification within the two-level structure of CBS. Unlike conventional CBS variants, the low-level planner applies a gradient descent approach using an Artificial Potential Field. This field generates repulsive forces that guide the trajectory of the conflicting manipulator away from those of other robots. As a result, subsequent conflicts are less likely to occur. Additionally, we develop a strategy that, under a specific condition, directly attempts to find a conflict-free solution in a single step without growing the constraint tree. Through extensive tests including physical robot experiments, we demonstrate that our method consistently reduces the number of expanded nodes in the constraint tree, achieves a higher success rate, and finds a solution faster compared to Enhanced CBS and other state-of-the-art algorithms.

Understanding Physical Properties of Unseen Deformable Objects by Leveraging Large Language Models and Robot Actions

In this paper, we consider the problem of understanding the physical properties of unseen objects through interactions between the objects and a robot. Handling unseen objects with special properties such as deformability is challenging for traditional task and motion planning approaches as they are often with the closed world assumption. Recent results in Large Language Models (LLMs) based task planning have shown the ability to reason about unseen objects. However, most studies assume rigid objects, overlooking their physical properties. We propose an LLM-based method for probing the physical properties of unseen deformable objects for the purpose of task planning. For a given set of object properties (e.g., foldability, bendability), our method uses robot actions to determine the properties by interacting with the objects. Based on the properties examined by the LLM and robot actions, the LLM generates a task plan for a specific domain such as object packing. In the experiment, we show that the proposed method can identify properties of deformable objects, which are further used for a bin-packing task where the properties take crucial roles to succeed.