Simultaneous Trajectory Optimization and Contact Selection for Multi-Modal Manipulation Planning

Understand

Complex dexterous manipulations require switching between prehensile and non-prehensile grasps, and sliding and pivoting the object against the environment.

• This paper presents a manipulation planner that is able to reason about diverse changes of contacts to discover such plans.
• It implements a hybrid approach that performs contact-implicit trajectory optimization for pivoting and sliding manipulation primitives and sampling-based planning to change between manipulation primitives and target object poses.
• The optimization method, simultaneous trajectory optimization and contact selection (STOCS), introduces an infinite programming framework to dynamically select from contact points and support forces between the object and environment during a manipulation primitive.