Zero-shot Whole-Body Manipulation with a Large-Scale Soft Robotic Torso via Guided Reinforcement Learning

Abstract: Whole-body manipulation is a powerful yet underexplored approach that enables robots to interact with large, heavy, or awkward objects using more than just their end-effectors. Soft robots, with their inherent passive compliance, are particularly well-suited for such contact-rich manipulation tasks, but their uncertainties in kinematics and dynamics pose significant challenges for simulation and control. In this work, we address this challenge with a simulation that can run up to 350x real time on a single thread in MuJoCo and provide a detailed analysis of the critical tradeoffs between speed and accuracy for this simulation. Using this framework, we demonstrate a successful zero-shot sim-to-real transfer of a learned whole-body manipulation policy, achieving an 88% success rate on the Baloo hardware platform. We show that guiding RL with a simple motion primitive is critical to this success where standard reward shaping methods struggled to produce a stable and successful policy for whole-body manipulation. Furthermore, our analysis reveals that the learned policy does not simply mimic the motion primitive. It exhibits beneficial reactive behavior, such as re-grasping and perturbation recovery. We analyze and contrast this learned policy against an open-loop baseline to show that the policy can also exhibit aggressive over-corrections under perturbation. To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of forceful, six-DoF whole-body manipulation using two continuum soft arms on a large-scale platform (10 kg payloads), with zero-shot policy transfer.