The Robotics Institute

Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute

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Abstract

In this paper, we address the problem of Navigation Among Movable Obstacles (NAMO): a practical extension to navigation for humanoids and other dexterous mobile robots. The robot is permitted to reconfigure the environment by moving obstacles and clearing free space for a path. This paper presents a resolution complete planner for a subclass of NAMO problems. Our planner takes advantage of the navigational structure through state-space decomposition and heuristic search. The planning complexity is reduced to the difficulty of the specific navigation task, rather than the dimensionality of the multiobject domain. We demonstrate real-time results for spaces that contain large numbers of movable obstacles. We also present a practical framework for single-agent search that can be used in algorithmic reasoning about this domain.

Keywords

NAMO, movable obstacle, motion planning, navigation, manipulation, planning

Notes

Associated Center(s) / Consortia: Center for the Foundations of Robotics

Associated Lab(s) / Group(s): Planning and Autonomy Lab

Associated Project(s): Navigation Among Movable Obstacles

Number of pages: 24

Text Reference

Michael Stilman and James Kuffner, "Navigation Among Movable Obstacles: Real-Time Reasoning in Complex Environments," International Journal of Humanoid Robotics, Vol. 2, No. 4, December, 2005, pp. 479-504.

BibTeX Reference

@article{Stilman_2005_5374,
   author = "Michael Stilman and James Kuffner",
   editor = "G. Cheng",
   title = "Navigation Among Movable Obstacles: Real-Time Reasoning in Complex Environments",
   journal = "International Journal of Humanoid Robotics",
   pages = "479-504",
   publisher = "World Scientific",
   month = "December",
   year = "2005",
   volume = "2",
   number = "4",
}

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