Combined Task and Motion Planning for a Dual-arm Robot to Use a Suction Cup Tool

This paper proposes a combined task and motion planner for a dual-arm robot to use a suction cup tool. The planner consists of three sub-planners -- A suction pose sub-planner and two regrasp and motion sub-planners. The suction pose sub-planner finds all the available poses for a suction cup tool to suck on the object, using the models of the tool and the object. The regrasp and motion sub-planner builds the regrasp graph that represents all possible grasp sequences to reorient and move the suction cup tool from an initial pose to a goal pose. Two regrasp graphs are used to plan for a single suction cup and the complex of the suction cup and an object respectively. The output of the proposed planner is a sequence of robot motion that uses a suction cup tool to manipulate objects following human instructions. The planner is examined and analyzed by both simulation experiments and real-world executions using several real-world tasks. The results show that the planner is efficient, robust, and can generate sequential transit and transfer robot motion to finish complicated combined task and motion planning tasks in a few seconds.