Task and Motion Planning of Fetch-And-Carry Including Push-Aside Action Using Mixed Integer Linear Programming

This paper describes a method for solving task planning and motion planning problems simultaneously. We target a fetch-and-carry of a small item by a single-arm mobile manipulator and introduce a method that can generate a sequence of actions and motions required for each action, even in environments with narrow open spaces such as corridors. In addition, to deal with a case where another object is already placed at the target location, we introduce a push-aside action and extend the previous method to include this action. As our method is formulated using Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP), the calculation time is relatively short, irrespective of the complexity of the target problem. To verify the efficiency of the proposed method, we performed a quantitative evaluation through simulation and conducted experiments on an actual mobile manipulator to verify feasibility of the methods.