LocoMan: Advancing Versatile Quadrupedal Dexterity with Lightweight Loco-Manipulators

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Lin, Changyi, Liu, Xingyu, Yang, Yuxiang, Niu, Yaru, Yu, Wenhao, Zhang, Tingnan, Tan, Jie, Boots, Byron, Zhao, Ding
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Lin, Changyi
Liu, Xingyu
Yang, Yuxiang
Niu, Yaru
Yu, Wenhao
Zhang, Tingnan
Tan, Jie
Boots, Byron
Zhao, Ding
author_facet Lin, Changyi
Liu, Xingyu
Yang, Yuxiang
Niu, Yaru
Yu, Wenhao
Zhang, Tingnan
Tan, Jie
Boots, Byron
Zhao, Ding
contents Quadrupedal robots have emerged as versatile agents capable of locomoting and manipulating in complex environments. Traditional designs typically rely on the robot's inherent body parts or incorporate top-mounted arms for manipulation tasks. However, these configurations may limit the robot's operational dexterity, efficiency and adaptability, particularly in cluttered or constrained spaces. In this work, we present LocoMan, a dexterous quadrupedal robot with a novel morphology to perform versatile manipulation in diverse constrained environments. By equipping a Unitree Go1 robot with two low-cost and lightweight modular 3-DoF loco-manipulators on its front calves, LocoMan leverages the combined mobility and functionality of the legs and grippers for complex manipulation tasks that require precise 6D positioning of the end effector in a wide workspace. To harness the loco-manipulation capabilities of LocoMan, we introduce a unified control framework that extends the whole-body controller (WBC) to integrate the dynamics of loco-manipulators. Through experiments, we validate that the proposed whole-body controller can accurately and stably follow desired 6D trajectories of the end effector and torso, which, when combined with the large workspace from our design, facilitates a diverse set of challenging dexterous loco-manipulation tasks in confined spaces, such as opening doors, plugging into sockets, picking objects in narrow and low-lying spaces, and bimanual manipulation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2403_18197
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle LocoMan: Advancing Versatile Quadrupedal Dexterity with Lightweight Loco-Manipulators
Lin, Changyi
Liu, Xingyu
Yang, Yuxiang
Niu, Yaru
Yu, Wenhao
Zhang, Tingnan
Tan, Jie
Boots, Byron
Zhao, Ding
Robotics
Quadrupedal robots have emerged as versatile agents capable of locomoting and manipulating in complex environments. Traditional designs typically rely on the robot's inherent body parts or incorporate top-mounted arms for manipulation tasks. However, these configurations may limit the robot's operational dexterity, efficiency and adaptability, particularly in cluttered or constrained spaces. In this work, we present LocoMan, a dexterous quadrupedal robot with a novel morphology to perform versatile manipulation in diverse constrained environments. By equipping a Unitree Go1 robot with two low-cost and lightweight modular 3-DoF loco-manipulators on its front calves, LocoMan leverages the combined mobility and functionality of the legs and grippers for complex manipulation tasks that require precise 6D positioning of the end effector in a wide workspace. To harness the loco-manipulation capabilities of LocoMan, we introduce a unified control framework that extends the whole-body controller (WBC) to integrate the dynamics of loco-manipulators. Through experiments, we validate that the proposed whole-body controller can accurately and stably follow desired 6D trajectories of the end effector and torso, which, when combined with the large workspace from our design, facilitates a diverse set of challenging dexterous loco-manipulation tasks in confined spaces, such as opening doors, plugging into sockets, picking objects in narrow and low-lying spaces, and bimanual manipulation.
title LocoMan: Advancing Versatile Quadrupedal Dexterity with Lightweight Loco-Manipulators
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.18197