# Sampling-based Planning of In-Hand Manipulation with External Pushes

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.00318 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.00318/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 2 Jul 2017.

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Rotating without Seeing: Towards In-hand Dexterity through Touch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10880/) (2023)
- [Robot Synesthesia: In-Hand Manipulation with Visuotactile Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.01853/) (2023)
- [Learning to Grasp the Ungraspable with Emergent Extrinsic Dexterity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.01500/) (2022)
- [DexTouch: Learning to Seek and Manipulate Objects with Tactile Dexterity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12496/) (2024)
- [RP1M: A Large-Scale Motion Dataset for Piano Playing with Bi-Manual Dexterous Robot Hands](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11048/) (2024)
- [A Differentiable Recipe for Learning Visual Non-Prehensile Planar Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.05318/) (2021)
- [Emerging Extrinsic Dexterity in Cluttered Scenes via Dynamics-aware Policy Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.09882/) (2026)
- [On the Fly Adaptation of Behavior Tree-Based Policies through Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06309/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper presents a sampling-based planning algorithm for in-hand manipulation of a grasped object using a series of external pushes. A high-level sampling-based planning framework, in tandem with a low-level inverse contact dynamics solver, effectively explores the space of continuous pushes with discrete pusher contact switch-overs. We model the frictional interaction between gripper, grasped object, and pusher, by discretizing complex surface/line contacts into arrays of hard frictional point contacts. The inverse dynamics problem of finding an instantaneous pusher motion that yields a desired instantaneous object motion takes the form of a mixed nonlinear complementarity problem. Building upon this dynamics solver, our planner generates a sequence of pushes that steers the object to a goal grasp. We evaluate the performance of the planner for the case of a parallel-jaw gripper manipulating different objects, both in simulation and with real experiments. Through these examples, we highlight the important properties of the planner: respecting and exploiting the hybrid dynamics of contact sticking/sliding/rolling and a sense of efficiency with respect to discrete contact switch-overs.