Towards Motion Plans That React to Contact Events

Intentional use of contact gains ground in the motion planning filed by exploiting it to reduce uncertainty. Our approach extends contact motion planning to reacts to contact events. Our reactive planner augments the state space by taking in consideration continuous and discrete events. We differentiate discrete contact events that can occur during the execution due to motion uncertainty. This way, the planner has an increased understanding of the state space. Moreover, the planner generates strategies tailored for the expected events. Thereby the reactive plan becomes more powerful. We validate our assumptions about reactive planning, by extending a nonreactive contact-exploiting motion planner with reactive features. We compare both planners capabilities within a 2D grasping problem. We show that reactiveness can deal with problems with high uncertainty where the non-reactive planner fails.