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Main Authors: He, Chengyang, Sun, Ge, Bai, Yue, Lu, Junkai, Zhao, Jiadong, Sartoretti, Guillaume
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.04381
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author He, Chengyang
Sun, Ge
Bai, Yue
Lu, Junkai
Zhao, Jiadong
Sartoretti, Guillaume
author_facet He, Chengyang
Sun, Ge
Bai, Yue
Lu, Junkai
Zhao, Jiadong
Sartoretti, Guillaume
contents We present FoundAtion-model-guided decoupled LoCO-maNipulation visuomotor policies (FALCON), a framework for loco-manipulation that combines modular diffusion policies with a vision-language foundation model as the coordinator. Our approach explicitly decouples locomotion and manipulation into two specialized visuomotor policies, allowing each subsystem to rely on its own observations. This mitigates the performance degradation that arise when a single policy is forced to fuse heterogeneous, potentially mismatched observations from locomotion and manipulation. Our key innovation lies in restoring coordination between these two independent policies through a vision-language foundation model, which encodes global observations and language instructions into a shared latent embedding conditioning both diffusion policies. On top of this backbone, we introduce a phase-progress head that uses textual descriptions of task stages to infer discrete phase and continuous progress estimates without manual phase labels. To further structure the latent space, we incorporate a coordination-aware contrastive loss that explicitly encodes cross-subsystem compatibility between arm and base actions. We evaluate FALCON on two challenging loco-manipulation tasks requiring navigation, precise end-effector placement, and tight base-arm coordination. Results show that it surpasses centralized and decentralized baselines while exhibiting improved robustness and generalization to out-of-distribution scenarios.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_04381
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle FALCON: Actively Decoupled Visuomotor Policies for Loco-Manipulation with Foundation-Model-Based Coordination
He, Chengyang
Sun, Ge
Bai, Yue
Lu, Junkai
Zhao, Jiadong
Sartoretti, Guillaume
Robotics
We present FoundAtion-model-guided decoupled LoCO-maNipulation visuomotor policies (FALCON), a framework for loco-manipulation that combines modular diffusion policies with a vision-language foundation model as the coordinator. Our approach explicitly decouples locomotion and manipulation into two specialized visuomotor policies, allowing each subsystem to rely on its own observations. This mitigates the performance degradation that arise when a single policy is forced to fuse heterogeneous, potentially mismatched observations from locomotion and manipulation. Our key innovation lies in restoring coordination between these two independent policies through a vision-language foundation model, which encodes global observations and language instructions into a shared latent embedding conditioning both diffusion policies. On top of this backbone, we introduce a phase-progress head that uses textual descriptions of task stages to infer discrete phase and continuous progress estimates without manual phase labels. To further structure the latent space, we incorporate a coordination-aware contrastive loss that explicitly encodes cross-subsystem compatibility between arm and base actions. We evaluate FALCON on two challenging loco-manipulation tasks requiring navigation, precise end-effector placement, and tight base-arm coordination. Results show that it surpasses centralized and decentralized baselines while exhibiting improved robustness and generalization to out-of-distribution scenarios.
title FALCON: Actively Decoupled Visuomotor Policies for Loco-Manipulation with Foundation-Model-Based Coordination
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.04381