Towards obtaining all possible contacts-growing a polyhedron by its location uncertainty

This paper provides a general and exact method of growing a polyhedral object in three-dimensional Cartesian space to take into account its orientation and position uncertainties. The work is particularly motivated by the need for automatically recognizing contact situations among objects in spite of uncertainties. The technique of growing surface elements of a polyhedron by uncertainty can be used to extract the set of all possible contact situations among polyhedral objects in the presence of location uncertainties, which can then serve as a basis for further and more accurate extraction of contact information by additional sensing means, such as vision and force/moment sensing