Abstract
The ability to build structures with autonomous robots using only found, minimally processed stones would be immensely useful, especially in remote areas. Assembly planning for dry-stacked structures, however, is difficult since both the state and action spaces are continuous, and stability is strongly affected by complex friction and contact constraints. We propose a planning algorithm for such assemblies that uses a physics simulator to find a small set of feasible poses and then evaluates them using a hierarchical filter. We carefully designed the heuristics for the filters to match our goal of building stable, free-standing walls. 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 in robotic dry stacking.
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