TABLE OF CONTENTS Xuerong Ji, University of North Carolina, Charlotte, NC
Jing Xiao, University of North Carolina, Charlotte, NC
Random sampling strategies play critical roles in randomized motion planners, which are promising and practical for motion planning problems with many degrees of freedom (dof). In this paper, we address random sampling in a constrained configuration space - the contact configuration space between two polyhedra, motivated by the need for generating contact motion plans. Given a contact formation (CF) between two polyhedra A and B, our approach is to randomly generate configurations of A satisfying the contact constraints of the CF. Key to the approach is to guarantee that sampling happens only in the constrained space to be efficient, which has not been addressed in the literature. We first describe our random sampling strategy for configurations constrained by CFs consisting of one or two principal contacts (PCs) and then present implementation results.
Contact motions are important in automatic assembly processes, not only because they happen frequently when clearance between objects is tight, but also because they reduce degrees of freedom (dof), thus reduce uncertainties [14, 16]. Contact motion occurs on the boundary of configuration space obstacles (C-obstacles) [13], but computing C-obstacles remains a formidable task to date. While there were exact descriptions of C-obstacles for polygons [2, 4], there were only approximations for polyhedra [5, 11]. Contact motions, however, require exactness of contact configurations. Hence, some researchers started exploring methodologies on contact motion planning without explicitly computing C-obstacles...
