The ability to manipulate objects in a desired configurations is a fundamental requirement for robots to complete various practical applications. While certain goals can be achieved by picking and placing the objects of interest directly, object reorientation is needed for precise placement in most of the tasks. In such scenarios, the object must be reoriented and re-positioned into intermediate poses that facilitate accurate placement at the target pose. To this end, we propose a reorientation planning method, ReorientDiff, that utilizes a diffusion model-based approach. The proposed method employs both visual inputs from the scene, and goal-specific language prompts to plan intermediate reorientation poses. Specifically, the scene and language-task information are mapped into a joint scene-task representation feature space, which is subsequently leveraged to condition the diffusion model. The diffusion model samples intermediate poses based on the representation using classifier-free guidance and then uses gradients of learned feasibility-score models for implicit iterative pose-refinement. The proposed method is evaluated using a set of YCB-objects and a suction gripper, demonstrating a success rate of 95.2% in simulation. Overall, our study presents a promising approach to address the reorientation challenge in manipulation by learning a conditional distribution, which is an effective way to move towards more generalizable object manipulation. For more results, checkout our website: https://utkarshmishra04.github.io/ReorientDiff.

This paper proposes a local path planning method with a reachable set for Automated vertical Parking Systems (APS). First, given a parking lot layout with a goal position, we define an intermediate pose for the APS to accomplish reverse parking with a single maneuver, i.e., without changing the gear shift. Then, we introduce a reachable set which is a set of points consisting of the grid points of all possible intermediate poses. Once the APS approaches the goal position, it must select an intermediate pose in the reachable set. A minimization problem was formulated and solved to choose the intermediate pose. We performed various scenarios with different parking lot conditions. We used the Hybrid-A* algorithm for the global path planning to move the vehicle from the starting pose to the intermediate pose and utilized clothoid-based local path planning to move from the intermediate pose to the goal pose. Additionally, we designed a controller to follow the generated path and validated its tracking performance. It was confirmed that the tracking error in the mean root square for the lateral position was bounded within 0.06m and for orientation within 0.01rad.