Incremental Task and Motion Planning: A Constraint-Based Approach

Abstract

—We present a new algorithm for task and motion planning (TMP) and discuss the requirements and abstractions necessary to obtain robust solutions for TMP in general. Our Iteratively Deepened Task and Motion Planning (IDTMP) method is probabilistically-complete and offers improved per- formance and generality compared to a similar, state-of-the-art, probabilistically-complete planner. The key idea of IDTMP is to leverage incremental constraint solving to efficiently add and remove constraints on motion feasibility at the task level. We validate IDTMP on a physical manipulator and evaluate scalability on scenarios with many objects and long plans, showing order-of-magnitude gains compared to the benchmark planner and a four-times self-comparison speedup from our extensions. Finally, in addition to describing a new method for TMP and its implementation on a physical robot, we also put forward requirements and abstractions for the development of similar planners in the future.