A geometrical placement planner for unknown sensor-modelled objects and placement areas

Abstract

A Personal Robot should be able to handle possible unknown objects in unknown environments. For a manipulation task the question what to do with an object once it had been grasped is one of the most essential ones beside the grasping task itself. We propose a placement planner for sensor-modelled objects in complex environments. The planner computes a stable position and orientation for the object in the environment. The algorithm uses only geometric information, most notably no force or torque sensor is required. In particular, we introduce a novel approach regarding the configuration computation. By means of experiments with various household objects the robustness and performance are validated. Further on, we compare our approach to a configuration computation using a physics simulation framework.