We present the "Busboy Problem": automating an efficient decluttering of cups, bowls, and silverware from a planar surface. As grasping and transporting individual items is highly inefficient, we propose policies to generate grasps for multiple items. We introduce the metric of Objects per Trip (OpT) carried by the robot to the collection bin to analyze the improvement seen as a result of our policies. In physical experiments with singulated items, we find that consolidation and multi-object grasps resulted in an 1.8x improvement in OpT, compared to methods without multi-object grasps. See https://sites.google.com/berkeley.edu/busboyproblem for code and supplemental materials.

翻译：我们提出了“勤杂工问题”：在平面表面上高效自动化清理杯子、碗和餐具的杂乱状态。由于逐个抓取和运输单个物品效率极低，我们提出了生成多物品抓取的策略。我们引入“每趟物体数”（Objects per Trip，OpT）这一指标，用于衡量机器人从抓取点到收纳箱每次行程所携带的物品数量，从而分析我们策略带来的改进效果。在针对单件物品的物理实验中，我们发现，与未使用多物体抓取的方法相比，整合与多物体抓取使OpT提升了1.8倍。代码和补充材料请参见https://sites.google.com/berkeley.edu/busboyproblem。