Effective and Robust Non-Prehensile Manipulation via Persistent Homology Guided Monte-Carlo Tree Search

Understand

Performing object retrieval in real-world workspaces must tackle challenges including \emph{uncertainty} and \emph{clutter}.

• One option is to apply prehensile operations, which can be time consuming in highly-cluttered scenarios.
• On the other hand, non-prehensile actions, such as pushing simultaneously multiple objects, can help to quickly clear a cluttered workspace and retrieve a target object.
• Such actions, however, can also lead to increased uncertainty as it is difficult to estimate the outcome of pushing operations.