Manifold-Guided Motion Planning for Tight Assemblies

Motion planning for rigid-body assembly poses a fundamental challenge in robotics due to tight geometric constraints. In such scenarios, feasible motions often require passing through (near-)zero clearance configurations in which the parts are tightly constrained by contact. In this work, we introduce Critical-Manifold Guided RRT (CMG-RRT), a sampling-based planner designed specifically for tight assembly problems. Our key observation is that in tight assemblies, valid solution paths lie on or near a critical manifold: the subset of configuration space consisting of poses with at least one contact point between parts. CMG-RRT guides exploration by adaptively biasing sampling toward neighborhoods of the critical manifold using a hierarchical subdivision of the configuration space. We prove that CMG-RRT is probabilistically complete under standard clearance assumptions. Empirical evaluation on challenging rotational assembly benchmarks demonstrates a 100% success rate across all tested instances, including, to the best of our knowledge, the first fully automatic solution of the Elk disentanglement puzzle. Our open source software is available through our project page: https://www.cgl.cs.tau.ac.il/projects/tight-assembly-planning.

Leveraging Two Robotic Arms for Tight Assembly Performance Gains

We provide a novel end-to-end framework for the execution of an assembly operation by two robotic arms, given the digital CAD models of the parts and their desired relative placement in their assembled state. We analyze and demonstrate the advantages of using two robotic arms simultaneously in tight assembly operations, compared to single-arm systems. Our method is implemented in both simulation and using physical robots. It provides theoretical guarantees on execution time and trajectory accuracy, supported by empirical evidence. In particular, we show that coordinated movement of two arms reduces average execution time by more than 50% compared to using a single arm only, produces higher-quality trajectories, and accelerates the search for valid robot placements. Furthermore, we establish bounds on the required dimensions of the robotic cell. Our open source software together with real-life video demonstrations are available in our project page.