PushAround: Collaborative Path Clearing via Physics-Informed Hybrid Search

Overview & Synopsis

Large vehicles in cluttered environments are often blocked by movable obstacles, motivating mobile robot teams to clear traversable corridors. Navigation Among Movable Obstacles (NAMO) approaches often abstract obstacle displacements while neglecting robot dimensions, obstacle mass, contact geometry and forces, yielding physically infeasible plans. PushAround is a physics-informed hybrid search that couples geometric connectivity reasoning with short-horizon simulation to construct executable clearing plans. Repeated W-clearance connectivity graph (WCCG) queries expose frontier gaps requiring widening and rank them by estimated downstream costs. The search generates direct or recursive pushing candidates, selecting obstacles, directions, contacts and forces, and admits physics-evaluated candidates. Numerical experiments validate WCCG against standard connectivity checks and demonstrate scaling to denser clutter and teams of up to four robots, with robustness to simulated execution-side physical-parameter mismatch.