Automatic Generation of High-level Contact State Space between Planar Curved Objects

Information of high-level, topological contact states is useful and even necessary for a wide range of applications, including many robotics applications. While there is considerable research related to topological contact states between two polyhedral objects, little is studied about how to characterize, represent, and automatically generate topological contact states between curved objects. In this paper we extend the representation of topological contact states between polyhedral objects to general planar curved objects in terms of contacting curve elements, obtained from curvature monotonic segmentation [6]. We further introduce an approach to generate automatically graphs of such contact states between two planar curved objects, which represent not only valid contact states but also adjacency relations among those contact states. Implementation results of the related algorithms demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. The approach can be naturally extended to generation of contact states between 3-D curved objects.