GOMP-FIT: Grasp-Optimized Motion Planning for Fast Inertial Transport

Jeffrey Ichnowski, Yahav Avigal, Yi Liu, Ken Goldberg

Rapidly transporting objects using inertial effects to avoiding spills and damage to fragile objects.

Paper (arXiv)

Video

Abstract

High-speed motions in pick-and-place operations are critical to making robots cost-effective in many automation scenarios, from warehouses and manufacturing to hospitals and homes. However, motions can be too fast—such as when the object being transported has an open-top, is fragile, or both. One way to avoid spills or damage, is to move the arm slowly. We propose Grasp-Optimized Motion Planning for Fast Inertial Transport (GOMP-FIT), a time-optimizing motion planner based on our prior work, that includes constraints based on accelerations at the robot end-effector. With GOMP-FIT, a robot can perform high-speed motions that avoid obstacles and use inertial forces to its advantage. In experiments transporting open-top containers with varying tilt tolerances, whereas GOMP computes sub-second motions that spill up to 90% of the contents during transport, GOMP-FIT generates motions that spill 0% of contents while being slowed by as little as 0% when there are few obstacles, 30% when there are high obstacles and 45-degree tolerances, and 50% when there 15-degree tolerances and few obstacles.

Citation

@misc{ichnowski2021gompfit,
  title={{GOMP-FIT}: Grasp-Optimized Motion Planning for Fast Inertial Transport}, 
  author={Jeffrey Ichnowski and Yahav Avigal and Yi Liu and Ken Goldberg},
  year={2021},
  eprint={2110.15326},
  archivePrefix={arXiv},
  primaryClass={cs.RO}
}