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arXiv · 2608.15541

Contact Modes Are Strata: What Geometric Structure Buys in Discrete-Continuous Planning

Phone Thiha Kyaw·Jonathan Kelly
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Abstract

Contact-rich manipulation poses a discrete question and a continuous one at once, namely which contacts are active and how to move while they hold. The two are coupled by a change of dimension, since each contact that a robot maintains confines its motion to a lower-dimensional manifold. We make that coupling the explicit object of planning by observing that a contact mode is not merely analogous to a stratum of the configuration space; it is one. A plan is then a walk over strata whose within-stratum segments are geodesics. On two contact-rich manipulation tasks in simulation, pushing a T-shaped block around obstacles and reorienting a cube in a dexterous hand, our planner returns solutions within seconds with no mode, contact sequence, or stratum given in advance.

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Phone Thiha Kyaw, Jonathan Kelly. 2026-08-16. Contact Modes Are Strata: What Geometric Structure Buys in Discrete-Continuous Planning. https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.15541

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