Multi-Quadruped Cooperative Object Transport: Learning Decentralized Pinch-Lift-Move

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Pandit, Bikram, Shrestha, Aayam Kumar, Fern, Alan
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Pandit, Bikram
Shrestha, Aayam Kumar
Fern, Alan
author_facet Pandit, Bikram
Shrestha, Aayam Kumar
Fern, Alan
contents We study decentralized cooperative transport using teams of N-quadruped robots with arm that must pinch, lift, and move ungraspable objects through physical contact alone. Unlike prior work that relies on rigid mechanical coupling between robots and objects, we address the more challenging setting where mechanically independent robots must coordinate through contact forces alone without any communication or centralized control. To this end, we employ a hierarchical policy architecture that separates base locomotion from arm control, and propose a constellation reward formulation that unifies position and orientation tracking to enforce rigid contact behavior. The key insight is encouraging robots to behave as if rigidly connected to the object through careful reward design and training curriculum rather than explicit mechanical constraints. Our approach enables coordination through shared policy parameters and implicit synchronization cues - scaling to arbitrary team sizes without retraining. We show extensive simulation experiments to demonstrate robust transport across 2-10 robots on diverse object geometries and masses, along with sim2real transfer results on lightweight objects.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_14342
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Multi-Quadruped Cooperative Object Transport: Learning Decentralized Pinch-Lift-Move
Pandit, Bikram
Shrestha, Aayam Kumar
Fern, Alan
Robotics
We study decentralized cooperative transport using teams of N-quadruped robots with arm that must pinch, lift, and move ungraspable objects through physical contact alone. Unlike prior work that relies on rigid mechanical coupling between robots and objects, we address the more challenging setting where mechanically independent robots must coordinate through contact forces alone without any communication or centralized control. To this end, we employ a hierarchical policy architecture that separates base locomotion from arm control, and propose a constellation reward formulation that unifies position and orientation tracking to enforce rigid contact behavior. The key insight is encouraging robots to behave as if rigidly connected to the object through careful reward design and training curriculum rather than explicit mechanical constraints. Our approach enables coordination through shared policy parameters and implicit synchronization cues - scaling to arbitrary team sizes without retraining. We show extensive simulation experiments to demonstrate robust transport across 2-10 robots on diverse object geometries and masses, along with sim2real transfer results on lightweight objects.
title Multi-Quadruped Cooperative Object Transport: Learning Decentralized Pinch-Lift-Move
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14342