A heuristic motion planner using contact for assembly

The authors present an assembly motion planner for two polyhedral objects. The retraction subspace is defined by the configuration of these objects where they are in a particular contact such that the motion has zero or one degree of freedom. The planner gives assembly trajectories defined by a set of contacts. Each portion of the generated path is associated to a contact state with constant qualitative properties. A contact graph is associated to the boundary structure of the configuration space. The planner includes an incremental method to build the graph and to find a path. Some heuristics are defined to select locally the best arcs to compute. A first version of the planner has been implemented. Simulation results of an assembly trajectory planned by the system are presented