Planning motion compliant to complex contact states

In robotic tasks and in mechanism design, planning motion compliant to contacts is often desired, 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 is exactly compliant to a desired contact state, especially when the configuration 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. We describe such a planner for planning motion compliant to a contact formation between two arbitrary polyhedra and present results of implementation.