A divide-and-merge approach to automatic generation of contact states and planning of contact motion

Planning contact motion is important for many robotic tasks but difficult in general due to high variability and geometrical complexity of contact states. It is desirable to decompose the problem into simpler subproblems. A promising decomposition treats the problem as consisting of: 1) automatic generation of a discrete contact state graph, and 2) planning contact transitions between neighboring contact states and contact motions within the same contact state. This paper addresses a divide-and-merge approach on solving the general problem by such a decomposition. It discusses issues related to solving the two subproblems and provides examples of automatically generated contact state graphs between two contacting 3D polyhedra by the approach, which extend the results for 2D polygons reported by Ji et al. (1999)