Planning Motion Compliant to Complex Contact States

Many robotic tasks require compliant motion, but planning such motion poses special challenges not present in collision-free motion planning. One challenge is how to achieve exactness, i.e., how to make sure that a planned path exactly compliant to a desired contact state, especially when the con guration manifold of such a contact state is hard to describe analytically due to high geometrical complexity and/or high dimensionality. We tackle the problem with a hybrid approach of direct computation to exploit contact constraints and randomized planning. In this paper, we describe such a planner for planning motion compliant to a contact formation between two arbitrary polyhedra and present results of implementation.