Tuning Interaction in Motion Planning with Contact

This work deals with planning processes for the assistance to manipulation in order to simulate industrial tasks such as assembly, maintenance or disassembly in Virtual Reality. This paper presents a novel interactive path planning algorithm with contact based on an BiRRT approach. First, we propose a real-time interactive planner where both a computer and a human operator simultaneously search the workspace therefore largely speeding up the process. An authority sharing parameter can control the autonomy of the computer. Then we present a novel contact-space algorithm able to sample on the surface of obstacles. This method helps finding paths in cluttered environments or solving specific contact tasks such as insertion or sliding operations. We finish by presenting the results of our interactive path planner with contact through three examples showing significant improvement over usual methods in both free and contact space.