This paper presents an efficient approach to object manipulation planning using Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to find contact sequences and an efficient ADMM-based trajectory optimization algorithm to evaluate the dynamic feasibility of candidate contact sequences. To accelerate MCTS, we propose a methodology to learn a goal-conditioned policy-value network to direct the search towards promising nodes. Further, manipulation-specific heuristics enable to drastically reduce the search space. Systematic object manipulation experiments in a physics simulator and on real hardware demonstrate the efficiency of our approach. In particular, our approach scales favorably for long manipulation sequences thanks to the learned policy-value network, significantly improving planning success rate.
@article{arxiv.2206.09023,
title = {Efficient Object Manipulation Planning with Monte Carlo Tree Search},
author = {Huaijiang Zhu and Avadesh Meduri and Ludovic Righetti},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2206.09023},
year = {2023}
}