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1. Probabilistic Pick and Place Planning instead of Pick then Place Planning

   Devendran Shanthi, Mohanraj ; Hermans, Tucker ( October 2023 , IROS Workshop on Differentiable Probabilistic Robotics)
2. Leveraging symmetries in pick and place

   https://doi.org/10.1177/02783649231225775  

   Huang, Haojie ; Wang, Dian ; Tangri, Arsh ; Walters, Robin ; Platt, Robert ( January 2024 , The International Journal of Robotics Research)

   Robotic pick and place tasks are symmetric under translations and rotations of both the object to be picked and the desired place pose. For example, if the pick object is rotated or translated, then the optimal pick action should also rotate or translate. The same is true for the place pose; if the desired place pose changes, then the place action should also transform accordingly. A recently proposed pick and place framework known as Transporter Net (Zeng, Florence, Tompson, Welker, Chien, Attarian, Armstrong, Krasin, Duong, Sindhwani et al., 2021) captures some of these symmetries, but not all. This paper analytically studies the symmetries present in planar robotic pick and place and proposes a method of incorporating equivariant neural models into Transporter Net in a way that captures all symmetries. The new model, which we call Equivariant Transporter Net, is equivariant to both pick and place symmetries and can immediately generalize pick and place knowledge to different pick and place poses. We evaluate the new model empirically and show that it is much more sample-efficient than the non-symmetric version, resulting in a system that can imitate demonstrated pick and place behavior using very few human demonstrations on a variety of imitation learning tasks.

    

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3. Pick and Place Without Geometric Object Models

   https://doi.org/10.1109/ICRA.2018.8460553  

   Gualtieri, Marcus ; Pas, Andreas ten ; Platt, Robert ( May 2018 , Proceedings of 2018 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA))
4. Pick and place without geometric object models

   Gualtieri, Marcus ; ten Pas, Andreas ; Platt, Robert ( January 2018 , IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Robotics and Automation)
5. Towards Assistive Robotic Pick and Place in Open World Environments

   Wang, Dian ; Kohler, Colin ; ten Pas, Andreas ; Wilkinson, Alexander ; Liu, Maozhi ; Yanco, Holly ; Platt, Robert ( October 2019 , Proceedings of the International Symposium on Robotics Research (ISRR))

   Assistive robot manipulators must be able to autonomously pick and place a wide range of novel objects to be truly useful. However, current assistive robots lack this capability. Additionally, assistive systems need to have an interface that is easy to learn, to use, and to understand. This paper takes a step forward in this direction. We present a robot system comprised of a robotic arm and a mobility scooter that provides both pick-and-drop and pick-and-place functionality for open world environments without modeling the objects or environment. The system uses a laser pointer to directly select an object in the world, with feedback to the user via projecting an interface into the world. Our evaluation over several experimental scenarios shows a significant improvement in both runtime and grasp success rate relative to a baseline from the literature, and furthermore demonstrates accurate pick and place capabilities for tabletop scenarios. 

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