Automatic generation of contact state graphs between a polygon and a planar kinematic chain

Information of high-level, topological contact states is useful and sometimes even necessary for a wide range of robotic tasks involving interactions between a robot and its environment or objects of manipulation. While most of the existing research is focused on contact states between two rigid bodies, this paper presents a practical approach to represent concisely and generate automatically graphs of contact states between a polygonal object and an articulated planar object, i.e., a planar kinematic chain. The approach effectively exploits topological and geometrical constraints associated with such contact states to ensure both correctness and efficiency, as demonstrated by the implementation and applied examples.