  The discontinuities and multi-modality introduced by contacts make
manipulation planning challenging. Many previous works avoid this problem by
pre-designing a set of high-level motion primitives like grasping and pushing.
However, such motion primitives are often not adequate to describe dexterous
manipulation motions. In this work, we propose a method for dexterous
manipulation planning at a more primitive level. The key idea is to use contact
modes to guide the search in a sampling-based planning framework. Our method
can automatically generate contact transitions and motion trajectories under
the quasistatic assumption. In the experiments, this method sometimes generates
motions that are often pre-designed as motion primitives, as well as dexterous
motions that are more task-specific.
