Planning for Robotic Dry Stacking with Irregular Stones (FSR'19)

Dry stacking with found, minimally processed rocks is a useful capability when it comes to autonomous construction. However, it is a difficult planning problem since both the state and action space are continuous, and structural stability is strongly affected by complex friction and contact constraints. We propose an algorithmic approach for autonomous construction from a collection of irregularly shaped objects. The structure planning is calculated in simulation by first considering geometric and physical constraints to find a small set of feasible actions and then refined by using a hierarchical filter based on heuristics. These plans are then executed open-loop with a robotic arm equipped with a wrist RGB-D camera. Experimental results show that the proposed planning algorithm can significantly improve the state of the art robotics dry-stacking techniques.

* This work has accepted to FSR'19, supported by NSF#184634 and the SMART Community of Excellence at University at Buffalo.

** This project was developed while affiliated to the Department of Computer Science & Engineering, at University at Buffalo, The State University of New York.