First Plan Then Evaluate: Use a Vectorized Motion Planner for Grasping

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Matak, Martin, Shanthi, Mohanraj Devendran, Van Wyk, Karl, Hermans, Tucker
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Matak, Martin
Shanthi, Mohanraj Devendran
Van Wyk, Karl
Hermans, Tucker
author_facet Matak, Martin
Shanthi, Mohanraj Devendran
Van Wyk, Karl
Hermans, Tucker
contents Autonomous multi-finger grasping is a fundamental capability in robotic manipulation. Optimization-based approaches show strong performance, but tend to be sensitive to initialization and are potentially time-consuming. As an alternative, the generator-evaluator-planner framework has been proposed. A generator generates grasp candidates, an evaluator ranks the proposed grasps, and a motion planner plans a trajectory to the highest-ranked grasp. If the planner doesn't find a trajectory, a new trajectory optimization is started with the next-best grasp as the target and so on. However, executing lower-ranked grasps means a lower chance of grasp success, and multiple trajectory optimizations are time-consuming. Alternatively, relaxing the threshold for motion planning accuracy allows for easier computation of a successful trajectory but implies lower accuracy in estimating grasp success likelihood. It's a lose-lose proposition: either spend more time finding a successful trajectory or have a worse estimate of grasp success. We propose a framework that plans trajectories to a set of generated grasp targets in parallel, the evaluator estimates the grasp success likelihood of the resulting trajectories, and the robot executes the trajectory most likely to succeed. To plan trajectories to different targets efficiently, we propose the use of a vectorized motion planner. Our experiments show our approach improves over the traditional generator-evaluator-planner framework across different objects, generators, and motion planners, and successfully generalizes to novel environments in the real world, including different shelves and table heights. Project website https://sites.google.com/view/fpte
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_07162
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle First Plan Then Evaluate: Use a Vectorized Motion Planner for Grasping
Matak, Martin
Shanthi, Mohanraj Devendran
Van Wyk, Karl
Hermans, Tucker
Robotics
Autonomous multi-finger grasping is a fundamental capability in robotic manipulation. Optimization-based approaches show strong performance, but tend to be sensitive to initialization and are potentially time-consuming. As an alternative, the generator-evaluator-planner framework has been proposed. A generator generates grasp candidates, an evaluator ranks the proposed grasps, and a motion planner plans a trajectory to the highest-ranked grasp. If the planner doesn't find a trajectory, a new trajectory optimization is started with the next-best grasp as the target and so on. However, executing lower-ranked grasps means a lower chance of grasp success, and multiple trajectory optimizations are time-consuming. Alternatively, relaxing the threshold for motion planning accuracy allows for easier computation of a successful trajectory but implies lower accuracy in estimating grasp success likelihood. It's a lose-lose proposition: either spend more time finding a successful trajectory or have a worse estimate of grasp success. We propose a framework that plans trajectories to a set of generated grasp targets in parallel, the evaluator estimates the grasp success likelihood of the resulting trajectories, and the robot executes the trajectory most likely to succeed. To plan trajectories to different targets efficiently, we propose the use of a vectorized motion planner. Our experiments show our approach improves over the traditional generator-evaluator-planner framework across different objects, generators, and motion planners, and successfully generalizes to novel environments in the real world, including different shelves and table heights. Project website https://sites.google.com/view/fpte
title First Plan Then Evaluate: Use a Vectorized Motion Planner for Grasping
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07162