Automatic generation of high-level contact state space

Abstract

Planning in contact state space is very important for many robotics tasks. This paper introduces a general and novel approach for automatic creation of high-level, discrete contact state space between two objects, called contact formation (CF) graphs. A complete CF graph is the result of merging several special subgraphs, called the goal-contact relaxation graphs. We have implemented our algorithm for arbitrary contacting polygons, and the results obtained are presented in this paper. The implementation is extended for arbitrary contacting polyhedra. The time complexity of our algorithm is bounded by O(M/sup 2/), where M characterizes the maximum complexity of the two objects.