Papers for
warehouse automation operators
Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.
Robots coordinate precise collision-free actions for construction tasks
CAST: Collision-Aware Assembly with Construction Robots using Simultaneous Trajectory Estimation and Planning
Abstract: Multi-robot systems have shown increasing viability in construction due to their ability to execute high-precision actions while reducing human exposure to hazardous tasks. However, these environments have high-dimensional configuration spaces and possess substantial collision-avoidance constraints, which include other robots, assembly objects, and workspace boundaries. We utilize a single factor graph for trajectory estimation and planning that incorporates measured robot states together with explicit collision and learned cable constraints. This supports changing workspaces and enables synchronized, high-dimensional robot motion planning while accounting for the stiff, vibration-induced uncertainty of heavy robotic systems. We demonstrate the success of our framework on the construction of a post-and-lintel structure using one robot arm as a timber gripper, and a second robot as a nail-fastener.
Robotic system ranks grasp options to improve placement success rates
Execution-Aware Pre-Execution Ranking for Grasp-Conditioned Robotic Placement
Abstract: A geometrically valid placement can still be difficult to execute because the selected grasp changes the required end-effector pose, collision geometry, and transport motion. Placement is formulated as a pre-execution ranking problem in which supplied grasp-placement candidates are scored before planning. The model combines a typed target-conditioned point cloud with three pose descriptors and hierarchical heads for planning success and execution success conditioned on planning. On a 30-object, 1,235-scene dataset with scene-group-held-out splits, three-seed top-1 success on covered test groups reaches 85.63 +/- 1.08% for joint selection and 79.84 +/- 0.16% for fixed-target ranking. For the designated frozen seed-42 checkpoint, top-1 success improves from 72.84% to 85.78% over full-pool cuMotion for joint ranking and from 59.65% to 79.67% for fixed-target ranking. Frozen transfer to xArm7/MoveIt requires no xArm-specific retraining. Across 27 locked cases, 13 complete end to end (48.15%). Of the 16 cases that pass Top-5 preflight and begin execution, 13 succeed (81.25%). Candidate-level deployment-feasibility prediction reaches 81.25% recall, 85.20% specificity, and 83.23% balanced accuracy.
Multiagent pathfinding routing is fixed parameter tractable below sum distances
Routing Multiple Agents Below the Sum of Distances
Abstract: We study Transient Multiagent Pathfinding, a variant of the classical Multi-Agent Pathfinding problem in which a set of agents must be routed without collisions from designated start vertices to designated destination vertices in a graph. We analyze the problem within the above-and-below-guarantee paradigm of parameterized complexity. In particular, we consider the natural upper bound \(L\), given by the sum of the shortest-path distances between pairs of agents' terminals (corresponding to sequential routing of the agents). The parameterization is given by the gap \(ζ= L - λ\) between this bound and the target makespan \(λ\), together with the number \(k\) of agents. Our main result establishes fixed-parameter tractability for the combined parameter \(k + ζ\). Matching lower bounds show that parameterization by \(k\) alone is W[1]-hard, and that parameterization by \(ζ\) alone is W[1]-hard when terminals are not required to be distinct. On the positive side, if all terminals are distinct, the problem becomes fixed-parameter tractable when parameterized solely by \(ζ\). Finally, we show that Transient Multiagent Pathfinding is unlikely to admit a polynomial kernel when parameterized by \(k + ζ\). Together, our results provide an almost complete characterization of the parameterized complexity landscape of the problem for the considered parameters.