IMPACT: Intelligent Motion Planning with Acceptable Contact Trajectories via Vision-Language Models

ArXi:2503.10110v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Motion planning involves determining a sequence of robot configurations to reach a desired pose, subject to movement and safety constraints. Traditional motion planning finds collision-free paths, but this is overly restrictive in clutter, where it may not be possible for a robot to accomplish a task without contact. In addition, contacts range from relatively benign (e.g. brushing a soft pillow) to dangerous (e.g. toppling a glass vase), making it difficult to characterize which may be acceptable.