Planning of Pushing Manipulation by a Mobile Robot Considering Cost of Recovery Motion

This paper presents a planning method of pushing manipulation by a mobile robot. It is sometimes very useful if the robot can take recovery action, namely, re-approaching and re-pushing, when it turns out to be ineffective to keep current pushing motion. The proposed planning framework is based on the idea of mode switching, where three modes; approaching, pushing and re-pushing, are considered. The pushing motion is first built with dynamic programming, which provides value function of the state. Based on the value, planning of re-approaching to the object and re-pushing is conducted using a value iteration algorithm extended to state space with uncertainty. The proposed planning framework was evaluated in simulation, and it was shown that it provides more effective behaviour of the robot by recovery motion at an appropriate timing.