  Recent progress in the field of robotic manipulation has generated interest
in fully automatic object packing in warehouses. This paper proposes a
formulation of the packing problem that is tailored to the automated
warehousing domain. Besides minimizing waste space inside a container, the
problem requires stability of the object pile during packing and the
feasibility of the robot motion executing the placement plans. To address this
problem, a set of constraints are formulated, and a constructive packing
pipeline is proposed to solve for these constraints. The pipeline is able to
pack geometrically complex, non-convex objects with stability while satisfying
robot constraints. In particular, a new 3D positioning heuristic called
Heightmap-Minimization heuristic is proposed, and heightmaps are used to speed
up the search. Experimental evaluation of the method is conducted with a
realistic physical simulator on a dataset of scanned real-world items,
demonstrating stable and high-quality packing plans compared with other 3D
packing methods.
