Heuristic searches such as A* search are a popular means of finding least-cost plans due to their generality, strong theoretical guarantees on completeness and optimality, simplicity in implementation and consistent behavior. In planning for robotic manipulation, however, these techniques are commonly thought of as impractical due to the high-dimensionality of the planning problem. In this paper, we present a heuristic search-based approach to motion planning for manipulation that does deal effectively with the high-dimensionality of the problem. The paper presents a summary of the approach along with applications to single-arm and dual-arm motion planning with upright constraints on a PR2 robot operating in non-trivial cluttered spaces. An extensive experimental analysis in both simulation and on a physical PR2 shows that, in terms of runtime, our approach is on par with other most common sampling-based approaches and due to its deterministic cost-minimization, the computed motions are of good quality and are consistent, i.e. the resulting plans tend to be similar for similar tasks.

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, in cooperation with Stanford University's Department of Computer Science, was pleased to present the 2012 Spring Symposium Series, held Monday through Wednesday, March 26–28, 2012 at Stanford University, Stanford, California USA. The six symposia held were AI, The Fundamental Social Aggregation Challenge (cochaired by W. F. Lawless, Don Sofge, Mark Klein, and Laurent Chaudron); Designing Intelligent Robots (cochaired by George Konidaris, Byron Boots, Stephen Hart, Todd Hester, Sarah Osentoski, and David Wingate); Game Theory for Security, Sustainability, and Health (cochaired by Bo An and Manish Jain); Intelligent Web Services Meet Social Computing (cochaired by Tomas Vitvar, Harith Alani, and David Martin); Self-Tracking and Collective Intelligence for Personal Wellness (cochaired by Takashi Kido and Keiki Takadama); and Wisdom of the Crowd (cochaired by Caroline Pantofaru, Sonia Chernova, and Alex Sorokin). The papers of the six symposia were published in the AAAI technical report series.

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, in cooperation with Stanford University’s Department of Computer Science, was pleased to present the 2012 Spring Symposium Series, held Monday through Wednesday, March 26–28, 2012 at Stanford University, Stanford, California USA. The six symposia held were AI, The Fundamental Social Aggregation Challenge (cochaired by W. F. Lawless, Don Sofge, Mark Klein, and Laurent Chaudron); Designing Intelligent Robots (cochaired by George Konidaris, Byron Boots, Stephen Hart, Todd Hester, Sarah Osentoski, and David Wingate); Game Theory for Security, Sustainability, and Health (cochaired by Bo An and Manish Jain); Intelligent Web Services Meet Social Computing (cochaired by Tomas Vitvar, Harith Alani, and David Martin); Self-Tracking and Collective Intelligence for Personal Wellness (cochaired by Takashi Kido and Keiki Takadama); and Wisdom of the Crowd (cochaired by Caroline Pantofaru, Sonia Chernova, and Alex Sorokin). The papers of the six symposia were published in the AAAI technical report series.