Approximating Global Contact-Implicit MPC via Sampling and Local Complementarity

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Venkatesh, Sharanya, Bianchini, Bibit, Aydinoglu, Alp, Yang, William, Posa, Michael
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Venkatesh, Sharanya
Bianchini, Bibit
Aydinoglu, Alp
Yang, William
Posa, Michael
author_facet Venkatesh, Sharanya
Bianchini, Bibit
Aydinoglu, Alp
Yang, William
Posa, Michael
contents To achieve general-purpose dexterous manipulation, robots must rapidly devise and execute contact-rich behaviors. Existing model-based controllers are incapable of globally optimizing in real-time over the exponential number of possible contact sequences. Instead, recent progress in contact-implicit control has leveraged simpler models that, while still hybrid, make local approximations. However, the use of local models inherently limits the controller to only exploit nearby interactions, potentially requiring intervention to richly explore the space of possible contacts. We present a novel approach which leverages the strengths of local complementarity-based control in combination with low-dimensional, but global, sampling of possible end-effector locations. Our key insight is to consider a contact-free stage preceding a contact-rich stage at every control loop. Our algorithm, in parallel, samples end effector locations to which the contact-free stage can move the robot, then considers the cost predicted by contact-rich MPC local to each sampled location. The result is a globally-informed, contact-implicit controller capable of real-time dexterous manipulation. We demonstrate our controller on precise, non-prehensile manipulation of non-convex objects using a Franka Panda arm. Project page: https://approximating-global-ci-mpc.github.io
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_13350
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Approximating Global Contact-Implicit MPC via Sampling and Local Complementarity
Venkatesh, Sharanya
Bianchini, Bibit
Aydinoglu, Alp
Yang, William
Posa, Michael
Robotics
To achieve general-purpose dexterous manipulation, robots must rapidly devise and execute contact-rich behaviors. Existing model-based controllers are incapable of globally optimizing in real-time over the exponential number of possible contact sequences. Instead, recent progress in contact-implicit control has leveraged simpler models that, while still hybrid, make local approximations. However, the use of local models inherently limits the controller to only exploit nearby interactions, potentially requiring intervention to richly explore the space of possible contacts. We present a novel approach which leverages the strengths of local complementarity-based control in combination with low-dimensional, but global, sampling of possible end-effector locations. Our key insight is to consider a contact-free stage preceding a contact-rich stage at every control loop. Our algorithm, in parallel, samples end effector locations to which the contact-free stage can move the robot, then considers the cost predicted by contact-rich MPC local to each sampled location. The result is a globally-informed, contact-implicit controller capable of real-time dexterous manipulation. We demonstrate our controller on precise, non-prehensile manipulation of non-convex objects using a Franka Panda arm. Project page: https://approximating-global-ci-mpc.github.io
title Approximating Global Contact-Implicit MPC via Sampling and Local Complementarity
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.13350