Recent progress in the field of robotic manipulation has generated interest in fully automatic object packing in warehouses. This paper proposes a formulation of the packing problem that is tailored to the automated warehousing domain. Besides minimizing waste space inside a container, the problem requires stability of the object pile during packing and the feasibility of the robot motion executing the placement plans. To address this problem, a set of constraints are formulated, and a constructive packing pipeline is proposed to solve for these constraints. The pipeline is able to pack geometrically complex, non-convex objects with stability while satisfying robot constraints. In particular, a new 3D positioning heuristic called Heightmap-Minimization heuristic is proposed, and heightmaps are used to speed up the search. Experimental evaluation of the method is conducted with a realistic physical simulator on a dataset of scanned real-world items, demonstrating stable and high-quality packing plans compared with other 3D packing methods.
We also know of one packing work that takes into account robot manipulation feasibility @cite_20 , in which the author proposes a variant of the orthogonal 3D box packing scheme such that no prior packed box is in front of, to the right of, or above the current placing box, to avoid possible collision with a vacuum gripper. Although this placing rule prevents a robot from colliding with boxes whose dimensions are much larger than the vacuum gripper, it cannot be generalized to other gripper geometries (e.g., parallel jaw gripper) and does not consider other aspects of robot feasibility such as kinematic constraints and graspability constraints.
@cite_20
2053901957
In the three-dimensional bin packing problem the task is to orthogonally pack a given set of rectangular items into a minimum number of three-dimensional rectangular bins. We give a characterization of the algorithm proposed by (2000) for the exact solution of the problem, showing that not all orthogonal packings can be generated by the proposed algorithm. The packings, however, have the property of being robot packings, which is relevant in practical settings. References to the modified algorithm, which solves the orthogonal as well as robot packable three-dimensional problem, are given.