Vision assisted biasing for robot manipulation planning

Abstract

Sampling efficiency has been one of the major bottlenecks of sampling-based motion planner. Although being more reliable in complex environments, Rapidly-exploring Random Tree for example often requires longer planning time than its optimisation-based counterpart. Recent developments have introduced numerous methods to bias sampling in configuration-space. Gaussian mixture model, in particular, was proposed to estimate feasible regions in configuration-space for low-variance task. Unfortunately this method does not adapt its biases according to individual planning scene during inference. Therefore, this work proposes vision assisted biasing to adapt biases by changing the weights of Gaussian components upon query. It uses autoencoder to extract features directly from depth image, and the resulted latent code is then used for either nearest neighbours search or direct weights prediction. With a modified pipeline, these extensions show improvements on not only the sampling efficiency but also path optimality of simple motion planner.