Efficient Sampling of Transition Constraints for Motion Planning under Sliding Contacts

Contact-based motion planning for manipulation, object exploration or balancing often requires finding sequences of fixed and sliding contacts and planning the transition from one contact in the environment to another. However, most existing algorithms concentrate on the control and learning aspect of sliding contacts, but do not embed the problem into a principled framework to provide guarantees on completeness or optimality. To address this problem, we propose a method to extend constraint-based planning using contact transitions for sliding contacts. Such transitions are elementary operations required for whole contact sequences. To model sliding contacts, we define a sliding contact constraint that permits the robot to slide on the surface of a mesh-based object. To exploit transitions between sliding contacts, we develop a contact transition sampler, which uses three constraint modes: contact with a start surface, no contact and contact with a goal surface. We sample these transition modes uniformly which makes them usable with sampling-based planning algorithms. Our method is evaluated by testing it on manipulator arms of two, three and seven internal degrees of freedom with different objects and various sampling-based planning algorithms. This demonstrates that sliding contact constraints could be used as an elementary method for planning long-horizon contact sequences for high-dimensional robotic systems.