Deep Visual Heuristics: Learning Feasibility of Mixed-Integer Programs for Manipulation Planning

In this paper, we propose a deep neural network that predicts the feasibility of a mixed-integer program from visual input for robot manipulation planning. Integrating learning into task and motion planning is challenging, since it is unclear how the scene and goals can be encoded as input to the learning algorithm in a way that enables to generalize over a variety of tasks in environments with changing numbers of objects and goals. To achieve this, we propose to encode the scene and the target object directly in the image space.Our experiments show that our proposed network generalizes to scenes with multiple objects, although during training only two objects are present at the same time. By using the learned network as a heuristic to guide the search over the discrete variables of the mixed-integer program, the number of optimization problems that have to be solved to find a feasible solution or to detect infeasibility can greatly be reduced.