RoboDuet: Whole-body Legged Loco-Manipulation with Cross-Embodiment Deployment (2403.17367v4)

Abstract: Fully leveraging the mobile manipulation capabilities of a quadruped robot equipped with a robotic arm is non-trivial, as it requires controlling all degrees of freedom (DoFs) of the quadruped robot to achieve effective whole-body coordination. In this letter, we propose a novel framework RoboDuet, which employs two collaborative policies to realize locomotion and manipulation simultaneously, achieving whole-body control through mutual interactions. Beyond enabling large-range 6D pose tracking for manipulation, we find that the two-policy framework supports cross-embodiment deployment, allowing for the use of different quadruped robots or various robotic arms. Our experiments demonstrate that RoboDuet achieves a 42.5% improvement in average success rate over the baseline in mobile manipulation tasks employing whole-body control. These policies also enable zero-shot deployment across different quadruped robots in the real world. To support further research, we provide open-source code and additional videos on our website: locomanip-duet.github.io.