Locomotion

Contact Schedule

A contact schedule is the planned timing and sequence of contact events, specifying which feet or bodies touch which surfaces over a motion, used extensively in legged locomotion and increasingly in loco-manipulation. Given a schedule, the continuous trajectory optimization becomes smooth within each phase, so many controllers fix gait timings a priori, while contact-implicit optimization discovers schedules automatically at greater computational cost.

Why it matters for physical AI

Whether contact timing is fixed, optimized, or learned end-to-end is a central design axis in legged robot controllers, shaping agility, robustness to slips, and the difficulty of the learning problem.