Combining Motion Planning with an Action Formalism

Robotic manipulation is important for real, physical world applications. General Purpose manipulation with a robot (eg. delivering dishes, opening doors with a key, etc.) is demanding. It is hard because (1) objects are constrained in position and orientation, (2) many non-spatial constraints interact (or interfere) with each other, and (3) robots may have multidegree of freedoms (DOF). In this paper we solve the problem of general purpose robotic manipulation using a novel combination of motion planning and an action formalism (Situation Calculus). Our approach integrates motions of a robot with other actions (non-physical or external-to-robot) to achieve a goal while manipulating objects. It differs from previous, hierarchical approaches in that (a) it considers kinematic constraints in configuration space (CSpace) together with constraints over object manipulations; (b) it automatically generates high-level (logical) actions from a CSpace based motion planning algorithm; and (c) it decomposes a planning problem into small segments, thus reducing the complexity of planning.