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.
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