Bridging the Gap between Task Planning and Path Planning

Abstract

Autonomous service robots have to recognize and interpret their environment to be able to interact with it. This paper will focus on service tasks such as serving a glass of water where a humanoid two-arm-system has to acquire an object from the scene. A task planner should be able to autonomously discern the necessary actions to solve the task. In the process, a path planner can be used to compute motion sequences to execute these actions. To plan trajectories, the path planner requires a pair of configurations, the start and the goal configuration of the robot, to be provided e.g. by a task planner. This paper proposes a method to autonomously find the goal configurations necessary to acquire objects from the scene and thus makes an attempt to bridge the gap between task planning and path planning. The method determines where to grasp an object by analyzing the scene and the influence of obstacles on the intended grasp location. For the case where the goal object can not be grasped due to obstructing obstacles, a solution is proposed.