Object-Centric Kinodynamic Planning for Nonprehensile Robot Rearrangement Manipulation

Abstract: Nonprehensile actions such as pushing are crucial for addressing multi-object rearrangement problems. To date, existing nonprehensile solutions are all robot-centric, i.e., the manipulation actions are generated with robot-relevant intent and their outcomes are passively evaluated afterwards. Such pipelines are very different from human strategies and are typically inefficient. To this end, this work proposes a novel object-centric planning paradigm and develops the first object-centric planner for general nonprehensile rearrangement problems. By assuming that each object can actively move without being driven by robot interactions, the object-centric planner focuses on planning desired object motions, which are realized via robot actions generated online via a closed-loop pushing strategy. Through extensive experiments and in comparison with state-of-the-art baselines in both simulation and on a physical robot, we show that our object-centric paradigm can generate more intuitive and task-effective robot actions with significantly improved efficiency. In addition, we propose a benchmarking protocol to standardize and facilitate future research in nonprehensile rearrangement.