Versatile Multi-Contact Planning and Control for Legged Loco-Manipulation


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Date

2023-08

Publication Type

Journal Article

ETH Bibliography

yes

Citations

Altmetric

Data

Abstract

Loco-manipulation planning skills are pivotal for expanding the utility of robots in everyday environments. These skills can be assessed based on a system's ability to coordinate complex holistic movements and multiple contact interactions when solving different tasks. However, existing approaches have been merely able to shape such behaviors with hand-crafted state machines, densely engineered rewards, or pre-recorded expert demonstrations. Here, we propose a minimally-guided framework that automatically discovers whole-body trajectories jointly with contact schedules for solving general loco-manipulation tasks in pre-modeled environments. The key insight is that multi-modal problems of this nature can be formulated and treated within the context of integrated Task and Motion Planning (TAMP). An effective bilevel search strategy is achieved by incorporating domain-specific rules and adequately combining the strengths of different planning techniques: trajectory optimization and informed graph search coupled with sampling-based planning. We showcase emergent behaviors for a quadrupedal mobile manipulator exploiting both prehensile and non-prehensile interactions to perform real-world tasks such as opening/closing heavy dishwashers and traversing spring-loaded doors. These behaviors are also deployed on the real system using a two-layer whole-body tracking controller.

Publication status

published

Editor

Book title

Volume

8 (81)

Pages / Article No.

Publisher

AAAS

Event

Edition / version

Methods

Software

Geographic location

Date collected

Date created

Subject

Mobile manipulation; Legged Robotics; Multi-Contact Whole-Body Motion Planning and Control

Organisational unit

09570 - Hutter, Marco / Hutter, Marco check_circle
02284 - NFS Digitale Fabrikation / NCCR Digital Fabrication

Notes

Funding

852044 - Learning Mobility for Real Legged Robots (EC)

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