Contact-Rich Motion Planning via GPU-Parallel Mode Evaluation

Abstract

Contact-rich motion planning (CRMP) is essential for robotic manipulation and locomotion, yet remains computationally challenging due to combinatorial contact decisions. Existing methods typically avoid broad evaluation of contact-mode sequences through search heuristics or optimization reformulations. We revisit broad evaluation in light of modern GPU hardware and introduce Contact-Mode Expansion with parallel Trajectory optimization (CoMET), which combines GPU-parallel trajectory evaluation with greedy contact-mode expansion. On planar pushing benchmarks, CoMET is competitive with optimization-based, sampling, and tree-search baselines in solution quality and planning time, matching the full-enumeration reference on nearly all instances with fewer evaluations and shorter planning times. Ablations suggest that much of the performance gain comes from the high-throughput trajectory evaluator. In bimanual nonprehensile manipulation, GPU-friendly local mode expansion achieves higher planning success than the tested adaptive tree search as the mode space grows. These results demonstrate that broad explicit mode evaluation provides a simple yet effective alternative for CRMP.

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