In manipulation tasks, a robot interacts with movable object(s). The
configuration space in manipulation planning is thus the Cartesian product of
the configuration space of the robot with those of the movable objects. It is
the complex structure of such a "Composite Configuration Space" that makes
manipulation planning particularly challenging. Previous works approximate the
connectivity of the Composite Configuration Space by means of discretization or
by creating random roadmaps. Such approaches involve an extensive
pre-processing phase, which furthermore has to be re-done each time the
environment changes. In this paper, we propose a high-level Grasp-Placement
Table similar to that proposed by Tournassoud et al. (1987), but which does not
require any discretization or heavy pre-processing. The table captures the
potential connectivity of the Composite Configuration Space while being
specific only to the movable object: in particular, it does not require to be
re-computed when the environment changes. During the query phase, the table is
used to guide a tree-based planner that explores the space systematically. Our
simulations and experiments show that the proposed method enables improvements
in both running time and trajectory quality as compared to existing approaches.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figures, 1 tabl
