Geodesic Tracing-Based Kinematic Integration of Rolling and Sliding Contact on Manifold Meshes for Dexterous In-Hand Manipulation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a geodesic tracing-based integration scheme for modeling roll-slide contact directly on manifold meshes, improving dexterous in-hand manipulation planning accuracy over existing methods.

Contribution

It extends roll-slide contact modeling to manifold meshes and enables high-fidelity, mesh-based contact reasoning for dexterous manipulation planning.

Findings

Our method outperforms collision detection baselines in accuracy and precision.

It successfully plans dexterous motions with multi-finger robotic hands on complex objects.

The approach maintains stable grasping by minimizing contact sliding and spinning.

Abstract

Reasoning about rolling and sliding contact, or roll-slide contact for short, is critical for dexterous manipulation tasks that involve intricate geometries. But existing works on roll-slide contact mostly focus on continuous shapes with differentiable parametrizations. This work extends roll-slide contact modeling to manifold meshes. Specifically, we present an integration scheme based on geodesic tracing to first-order time-integrate roll-slide contact directly on meshes, enabling dexterous manipulation to reason over high-fidelity discrete representations of an object's true geometry. Using our method, we planned dexterous motions of a multi-finger robotic hand manipulating five objects in-hand in simulation. The planning was achieved with a least-squares optimizer that strives to maintain the most stable instantaneous grasp by minimizing contact sliding and spinning. Then, we evaluated our method against a baseline using collision detection and a baseline using primitive shapes. The results show that our method performed the best in accuracy and precision, even for coarse meshes. We conclude with a future work discussion on incorporating multiple contacts and contact forces to achieve accurate and robust mesh-based surface contact modeling.