Addressing Pose Uncertainty in Manipulation Planning Using Task Space Regions

We present an efficient approach to generating paths for a robotic manipulator that are collision-free and guaranteed to meet task specifications despite pose uncertainty. We first describe how to use task space regions (TSRs) to specify grasping and object placement tasks for a manipulator. We then show how to modify a set of TSRs for a certain task to take into account pose uncertainty. A key advantage of this approach is that if the pose uncertainty is too great to accomplish a certain task, we can quickly reject that task without invoking a planner. If the task is not rejected we run the IKBiRRT planner, which trades-off exploring the robot's C-space with sampling from TSRs to compute a path. Finally, we show several examples of a 7-DOF WAM arm planning paths in a cluttered kitchen environment where the poses of all objects are uncertain.