Simultaneous Planning and Estimation Based on Physics Reasoning in Robot Manipulation

For robots to autonomously achieve manipulation tasks in various scenes, advanced operational skills such as tool use, learning from demonstration, and multi-robot/human-robot cooperation are necessary. In this research, we devise a method for robots to realize such operational skills in a unified manner by evaluating physical consistency (referred to as “physics reasoning”) based on the formulation of the manipulation statics constraints. First, we propose manipulation planning and estimation methods in which the operational feasibility and properties' likelihood are derived by physics reasoning. In addition, we propose a framework to manipulate an object with unknown physical properties by executing planning and estimation both sequentially and in parallel. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods by performing experiments in which real humanoid robots achieve various manipulation tasks with advanced operational skills.