A Factorization Approach to Manipulation in Unstructured Environments

We propose factorization as a concept to analyze and solve manipulation problems in unstructured environments. A factorization is a decomposition of the original problem into factors (sub-problems), each of which can be solved much more easily than the original problem. The appropriate composition of these factors results in a robust and efficient solution to the original problem. Our assumption is that manipulation problems live in lower-dimensional subspaces of the highdimensional state space associated with unstructured environments. A factorization identifies these subspaces and therefore permits finding simple and robust solutions to the factors. In this paper, we examine the effects of factorization in the context of our recent work on manipulating articulated objects in unstructured environments.