Contact Modes Are Strata: What Geometric Structure Buys in Discrete-Continuous Planning

Engineering notes

Engineering notes will be added by the Robot Papers editorial team.

Chinese explanation / 中文解读

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Original abstract

Contact-rich manipulation poses a discrete question and a continuous one at once, namely which contacts are active and how to move while they hold. The two are coupled by a change of dimension, since each contact that a robot maintains confines its motion to a lower-dimensional manifold. We make that coupling the explicit object of planning by observing that a contact mode is not merely analogous to a stratum of the configuration space; it is one. A plan is then a walk over strata whose within-stratum segments are geodesics. On two contact-rich manipulation tasks in simulation, pushing a T-shaped block around obstacles and reorienting a cube in a dexterous hand, our planner returns solutions within seconds with no mode, contact sequence, or stratum given in advance.

Links and sources

• Official / arXiv page
• PDF from original source

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