On Random Sampling in Contact Con guration Space

Random sampling strategies play critical roles in randomized motion planners, which are promising and practical for motion planning problems with many degrees of freedom (dofs). In this paper, we address random sampling in a constrained con guration space { the contact con guration space between two polyhedra, motivated by the need for generating contact motion plans. Given a contact formation (CF) between two polyhedra A and B, our approach is to randomly generate con gurations of A satisfying the contact constraints of the CF. Key to the approach is to guarantee that sampling happens only in the constrained space to be e cient, which has not been addressed in the literature. We rst describe our random sampling strategy for con gurations constrained by CFs consisting of one or two principal contacts (PCs) and then present implementation results.