Efficient Object Manipulation Planning with Monte Carlo Tree Search

This paper presents an efficient approach to object manipulation planning using Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to find contact sequences and an efficient ADMM-based trajectory optimization algorithm to evaluate the dynamic feasibility of candidate contact sequences. To accelerate MCTS, we propose a methodology to learn a goal-conditioned policy-value network and a feasibility classifier to direct the search towards promising nodes. Further, manipulation-specific heuristics enable to drastically reduce the search space. Systematic object manipulation experiments in a physics simulator and on real hardware demonstrate the efficiency of our approach. In particular, our approach scales favorably for long manipulation sequences thanks to the learned policy-value network, significantly improving planning success rate. All source code including the baseline can be found at https://hzhu.io/contact-mcts.