Dexterous manipulation tasks often require contact switching, where fingers make and break contact with the object. We propose a method that plans trajectories for dexterous manipulation tasks involving contact switching using contact-implicit trajectory optimization (CITO) augmented with a high-level discrete contact sequence planner. We first use the high-level planner to find a sequence of finger contact switches given a desired object trajectory. With this contact sequence plan, we impose additional constraints in the CITO problem. We show that our method finds trajectories approximately 7 times faster than a general CITO baseline for a four-finger planar manipulation scenario. Furthermore, when executing the planned trajectories in a full dynamics simulator, we are able to more closely track the object pose trajectories planned by our method than those planned by the baselines.
@article{arxiv.2109.14088,
title = {TrajectoTree: Trajectory Optimization Meets Tree Search for Planning Multi-contact Dexterous Manipulation},
author = {Claire Chen and Preston Culbertson and Marion Lepert and Mac Schwager and Jeannette Bohg},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2109.14088},
year = {2021}
}