Towards Tight Convex Relaxations for Contact-Rich Manipulation

RSS 2024
1 Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

2 Department of Computer Science, Harvard University, Cambridge MA, USA.

TL;DR: We introduce a motion planning method for planning optimal contact-rich robot trajectories through the use of tight convex relaxations, and demonstrate its effectiveness on a non-prehensile manipulation task in the plane where a state-of-the-art usually fails.

Abstract

We present a novel method for global motion planning of robotic systems that interact with the environment through contacts. Our method directly handles the hybrid nature of such tasks using tools from convex optimization. We formulate the motion-planning problem as a shortest-path problem in a graph of convex sets, where a path in the graph corresponds to a contact sequence and a convex set models the quasi-static dynamics within a fixed contact mode. For each contact mode, we use semidefinite programming to relax the nonconvex dynamics that results from the simultaneous optimization of the object’s pose, contact locations, and contact forces. The result is a tight convex relaxation of the overall planning problem, that can be efficiently solved and quickly rounded to find a feasible contact-rich trajectory. As an initial application for evaluating our method, we apply it on the task of planar pushing. Exhaustive experiments show that our convex- optimization method generates plans that are consistently within a small percentage of the global optimum, without relying on an initial guess, and that our method succeeds in finding trajectories where a state-of-the-art baseline for contact-rich planning usually fails. We demonstrate the quality of these plans on a real robotic system.

Hardware demonstrations

Our method is able to generate close-to globally optimal plans for pushing tasks with collision-free motion planning between contact modes. Here, two different pushing trajectories for a T-shaped slider are shown, stabilized with a feedback controller on a real robotic system.

We demonstrate the feasibility of the obtained motion plans on a Kuka LBR iiwa 7 R800 7-DOF robotic arm, with a T-shaped slider object.

Comparison with State-of-the-Art

To compare our method with a state-of-the-art baseline for contact-rich planning, we select a direct, contact-implicit trajectory optimization method, that encodes contact implicitly using nonconvex complementarity constraints and solves the planning problem using local (nonconvex) optimization.

Success Rates:

Easy Case (Box-shaped geometry)

Contact-Implicit Trajectory Optimization: 58%

58%

Our method: 100%

100%

Hard Case (Tee-shaped geometry)

Contact-Implicit Trajectory Optimization: 12%

12%

Our method: 100%

100%

Solutions generated by our method:

Video presentation

BibTeX

@inproceedings{graesdal2024convexrelaxations,
  title={Towards Tight Convex Relaxations for Contact-Rich Manipulation},
  author={Bernhard Paus Graesdal and Shao Yuan Chew Chia and Tobia Marcucci and Savva Morozov and Alexandre Amice and Pablo A. Parrilo and Russ Tedrake},
  booktitle={Proceedings of Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS)},
  year={2024}
}