Robots Reasoning with Cuts and Connections: Creating and Removing Entities (Extended Abstract)

Several tasks that autonomous service robots will be expected to do involve changing material objects by cutting or separating parts, then rearranging them to obtain assemblages satisfying certain properties. In this paper we describe a system to represent and reason about entities that disappear or are created by the robot through such actions. Entities are grounded in objects that the robot can perceive and manipulate, and reasoning provides specific parameters for the robot's actions. For this paper, our system has knowledge only of geometric aspects related to cutting and rearrangement of objects. We test our system in simulation, but also discuss how it can be connected to a robot's perception and control.