  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.
