Safe, Occlusion-Aware Manipulation for Online Object Reconstruction in Confined Spaces

Abstract: Recent work in robotic manipulation focuses on object retrieval in cluttered spaces under occlusion. Nevertheless, the majority of efforts lack an analysis of conditions for the completeness of the approaches or the methods apply only when objects can be removed from the workspace. This work formulates the general, occlusion-aware manipulation task, and focuses on safe object reconstruction in a confined space with in-place rearrangement. It proposes a framework that ensures safety with completeness guarantees. Furthermore, an algorithm, which is an instantiation of this abstract framework for monotone instances is developed and evaluated empirically by comparing against a random and a greedy baseline on randomly generated experiments in simulation. Even for cluttered scenes with realistic objects, the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms the baselines and maintains a high success rate across experimental conditions.