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

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.

Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2608.15541 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2608.15541v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.15541 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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