Contact Mode Guided Sampling-Based Planning for Quasistatic Dexterous Manipulation in 2D

TL;DR

This paper introduces a contact mode guided sampling-based planning method for quasistatic dexterous manipulation in 2D, enabling automatic generation of contact transitions and task-specific motions.

Contribution

It presents a novel approach that uses contact modes to guide sampling-based planning, overcoming limitations of pre-designed motion primitives in dexterous manipulation.

Findings

Automatically generates contact transitions and trajectories.

Produces both primitive-like and task-specific dexterous motions.

Effective in 2D quasistatic manipulation scenarios.

Abstract

The discontinuities and multi-modality introduced by contacts make manipulation planning challenging. Many previous works avoid this problem by pre-designing a set of high-level motion primitives like grasping and pushing. However, such motion primitives are often not adequate to describe dexterous manipulation motions. In this work, we propose a method for dexterous manipulation planning at a more primitive level. The key idea is to use contact modes to guide the search in a sampling-based planning framework. Our method can automatically generate contact transitions and motion trajectories under the quasistatic assumption. In the experiments, this method sometimes generates motions that are often pre-designed as motion primitives, as well as dexterous motions that are more task-specific.