Robotic manipulation in human-centric environments often involves opening furniture doors. Most existing approaches target doors equipped with handles and rely on single-point contact strategies at a predefined contact location, which limits the space of feasible solutions. In contrast, handleless furniture doors pose unique challenges due to the absence of a convenient grasping point. This work investigates opening handleless furniture doors by pushing the door panel using multiple contact points. This expands the solution space compared to single-contact methods, enabling more versatile and robust manipulation across varying door configurations. To reduce online planning complexity, a strategy is introduced that exploits the simple geometry of door panels to precompute feasible contact poses. This precomputation substantially decreases the need for online search over contact points and tool orientations, and reduces collision-checking effort during planning. The approach is evaluated in both simulation and real-world experiments, demonstrating effective performance across a range of door properties and configurations.
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Šimundić, Valentin; Petrović, Luka; Cupec, Robert
Multi-Contact Robot Arm Path Planning for Opening Handleless Doors //
IEEE Transactions on Systems Man Cybernetics-Systems, (2026), doi: 10.1109/TSMC.2026.3656177
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