IMPACT: Intelligent Motion Planning with Acceptable Contact Trajectories via Vision-Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Ling, Yiyang, Owalekar, Karan, Adesanya, Oluwatobiloba, Bıyık, Erdem, Seita, Daniel
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866915844018143232
author Ling, Yiyang
Owalekar, Karan
Adesanya, Oluwatobiloba
Bıyık, Erdem
Seita, Daniel
author_facet Ling, Yiyang
Owalekar, Karan
Adesanya, Oluwatobiloba
Bıyık, Erdem
Seita, Daniel
contents Motion planning involves determining a sequence of robot configurations to reach a desired pose, subject to movement and safety constraints. Traditional motion planning finds collision-free paths, but this is overly restrictive in clutter, where it may not be possible for a robot to accomplish a task without contact. In addition, contacts range from relatively benign (e.g. brushing a soft pillow) to more dangerous (e.g. toppling a glass vase), making it difficult to characterize which may be acceptable. In this paper, we propose IMPACT, a novel motion planning framework that uses Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to infer environment semantics, identifying which parts of the environment can best tolerate contact based on object properties and locations. Our approach generates an anisotropic cost map that encodes directional push safety. We pair this map with a contact-aware A* planner to find stable contact-rich paths. We perform experiments using 20 simulation and 10 real-world scenes and assess using task success rate, object displacements, and feedback from human evaluators. Our results over 3200 simulation and 200 real-world trials suggest that IMPACT enables efficient contact-rich motion planning in cluttered settings while outperforming alternative methods and ablations. Our project website is available at https://impact-planning.github.io/.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_10110
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle IMPACT: Intelligent Motion Planning with Acceptable Contact Trajectories via Vision-Language Models
Ling, Yiyang
Owalekar, Karan
Adesanya, Oluwatobiloba
Bıyık, Erdem
Seita, Daniel
Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Motion planning involves determining a sequence of robot configurations to reach a desired pose, subject to movement and safety constraints. Traditional motion planning finds collision-free paths, but this is overly restrictive in clutter, where it may not be possible for a robot to accomplish a task without contact. In addition, contacts range from relatively benign (e.g. brushing a soft pillow) to more dangerous (e.g. toppling a glass vase), making it difficult to characterize which may be acceptable. In this paper, we propose IMPACT, a novel motion planning framework that uses Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to infer environment semantics, identifying which parts of the environment can best tolerate contact based on object properties and locations. Our approach generates an anisotropic cost map that encodes directional push safety. We pair this map with a contact-aware A* planner to find stable contact-rich paths. We perform experiments using 20 simulation and 10 real-world scenes and assess using task success rate, object displacements, and feedback from human evaluators. Our results over 3200 simulation and 200 real-world trials suggest that IMPACT enables efficient contact-rich motion planning in cluttered settings while outperforming alternative methods and ablations. Our project website is available at https://impact-planning.github.io/.
title IMPACT: Intelligent Motion Planning with Acceptable Contact Trajectories via Vision-Language Models
topic Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.10110