Mastering physical interaction with frictional contact is essential to autonomous robotic manipulation and locomotion in a complex, cluttered and dynamically changing environment.

A common manipulation pipeline often consists of two stages. The first stage is to plan a collision free path to a pre-action pose followed by an open-loop action. The second stage is to adjust the in-hand pose with pick-and-place actions or fingertip motions. Contacts with the environment are minimized during the process. In sharp contrast, humans actively embrace environment contacts using compliant motions under rich feedback to guide manipulation, reduce uncertainty, and achieve dexterity.

Similarly, robust treatment of the changing contacts between legged robots and the ground remains a basic challenge for the field. For walking and running robots to successfully navigate complex and uncertain environments, they must intelligently manage and leverage these environmental contacts.

The stiffness and discontinuities inherent in models of impacts and frictional contact create significant problems for many traditional approaches to simulation, planning, and control and planning. These challenges have resulted in robotic approaches that seek to avoid, rather than leverage, contact and that are brittle to any unexpected contact. Many current techniques for both manipulation and locomotion therefore result in motions that are not nearly as dynamic or reliable as human activity.

The workshop seeks to address three major challenges: 1) high-fidelity yet tractable computational solution to rigid body frictional contacts modeling and soft material; 2) optimization-based motion planning without full mode scheduling; 3) control synthesis for contact-rich interaction with visual and tactile feedback.