Collaborative Loco-Manipulation for Pick-and-Place Tasks with Dynamic Reward Curriculum

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: An, Tianxu, De Vincenti, Flavio, Ma, Yuntao, Hutter, Marco, Coros, Stelian
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author An, Tianxu
De Vincenti, Flavio
Ma, Yuntao
Hutter, Marco
Coros, Stelian
author_facet An, Tianxu
De Vincenti, Flavio
Ma, Yuntao
Hutter, Marco
Coros, Stelian
contents We present a hierarchical RL pipeline for training one-armed legged robots to perform pick-and-place (P&P) tasks end-to-end -- from approaching the payload to releasing it at a target area -- in both single-robot and cooperative dual-robot settings. We introduce a novel dynamic reward curriculum that enables a single policy to efficiently learn long-horizon P&P operations by progressively guiding the agents through payload-centered sub-objectives. Compared to state-of-the-art approaches for long-horizon RL tasks, our method improves training efficiency by 55% and reduces execution time by 18.6% in simulation experiments. In the dual-robot case, we show that our policy enables each robot to attend to different components of its observation space at distinct task stages, promoting effective coordination via autonomous attention shifts. We validate our method through real-world experiments using ANYmal D platforms in both single- and dual-robot scenarios. To our knowledge, this is the first RL pipeline that tackles the full scope of collaborative P&P with two legged manipulators.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_13239
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Collaborative Loco-Manipulation for Pick-and-Place Tasks with Dynamic Reward Curriculum
An, Tianxu
De Vincenti, Flavio
Ma, Yuntao
Hutter, Marco
Coros, Stelian
Robotics
We present a hierarchical RL pipeline for training one-armed legged robots to perform pick-and-place (P&P) tasks end-to-end -- from approaching the payload to releasing it at a target area -- in both single-robot and cooperative dual-robot settings. We introduce a novel dynamic reward curriculum that enables a single policy to efficiently learn long-horizon P&P operations by progressively guiding the agents through payload-centered sub-objectives. Compared to state-of-the-art approaches for long-horizon RL tasks, our method improves training efficiency by 55% and reduces execution time by 18.6% in simulation experiments. In the dual-robot case, we show that our policy enables each robot to attend to different components of its observation space at distinct task stages, promoting effective coordination via autonomous attention shifts. We validate our method through real-world experiments using ANYmal D platforms in both single- and dual-robot scenarios. To our knowledge, this is the first RL pipeline that tackles the full scope of collaborative P&P with two legged manipulators.
title Collaborative Loco-Manipulation for Pick-and-Place Tasks with Dynamic Reward Curriculum
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13239