Gripper-Aware Automatic Dense Packing of Irregular Objects

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Article Summary

Automatic dense packing is widely desired in warehouse operations but remains a fundamental challenge in robotic manipulation. Existing work on irregular-object packing largely targets simulation with idealized contact, treating the object as an isolated rigid body. The gripper often enters as a discrete, post-hoc feasibility check, if considered at all, and the perception and contact drift accumulated during execution are not addressed. We present a closed-loop pipeline that integrates perception, gripper-aware placement optimization, and force-guided execution on a real manipulator. The optimizer represents the object together with the gripper as a single composite body of hierarchical sphere trees. It searches over five degrees of freedom on a GPU within a CMA-ES framework, with the vertical coordinate grounded analytically against the current heightmap. During execution, a force-monitored vertical descent stops on first contact. A post-release consolidation push then closes the residual lateral clearance that gripper-aware planning leaves behind. The container is re-perceived between placements so that drift does not accumulate. We validate the system on a Franka Emika Panda robot packing a 3D-printed set of flat, curved, and concave objects, and a YCB object subset. An ablation study isolates the contribution of gripper-aware optimization, the consolidation push, and mesh-derived geometry to end-to-end success, achieved density, and computational cost. We further benchmark against the heightmap-minimization method as a baseline representative of prior irregular-object packing work.

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