PAINT: Partner-Agnostic Intent-Aware Cooperative Transport with Legged Robots

Fuente: arXiv
Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Cao, Zhihao, An, Tianxu, Li, Chenhao, Coros, Stelian, Hutter, Marco
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
Materias:
Acceso en línea:
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
_version_ 1866914472228028416
author Cao, Zhihao
An, Tianxu
Li, Chenhao
Coros, Stelian
Hutter, Marco
author_facet Cao, Zhihao
An, Tianxu
Li, Chenhao
Coros, Stelian
Hutter, Marco
contents Collaborative transport requires robots to infer partner intent through physical interaction while maintaining stable loco-manipulation. This becomes particularly challenging in complex environments, where interaction signals are difficult to capture and model. We present PAINT, a lightweight yet efficient hierarchical learning framework for partner-agonistic intent-aware collaborative legged transport that infers partner intent directly from proprioceptive feedback. PAINT decouples intent understanding from terrain-robust locomotion: A high-level policy infers the partner interaction wrench using an intent estimator and a teacher-student training scheme, while a low-level locomotion backbone ensures robust execution. This enables lightweight deployment without external force-torque sensing or payload tracking. Extensive simulation and real-world experiments demonstrate compliant cooperative transport across diverse terrains, payloads, and partners. Furthermore, we show that PAINT naturally scales to decentralized multi-robot transport and transfers across robot embodiments by swapping the underlying locomotion backbone. Our results suggest that proprioceptive signals in payload-coupled interaction provide a scalable interface for partner-agnostic intent-aware collaborative transport.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_12852
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle PAINT: Partner-Agnostic Intent-Aware Cooperative Transport with Legged Robots
Cao, Zhihao
An, Tianxu
Li, Chenhao
Coros, Stelian
Hutter, Marco
Robotics
Collaborative transport requires robots to infer partner intent through physical interaction while maintaining stable loco-manipulation. This becomes particularly challenging in complex environments, where interaction signals are difficult to capture and model. We present PAINT, a lightweight yet efficient hierarchical learning framework for partner-agonistic intent-aware collaborative legged transport that infers partner intent directly from proprioceptive feedback. PAINT decouples intent understanding from terrain-robust locomotion: A high-level policy infers the partner interaction wrench using an intent estimator and a teacher-student training scheme, while a low-level locomotion backbone ensures robust execution. This enables lightweight deployment without external force-torque sensing or payload tracking. Extensive simulation and real-world experiments demonstrate compliant cooperative transport across diverse terrains, payloads, and partners. Furthermore, we show that PAINT naturally scales to decentralized multi-robot transport and transfers across robot embodiments by swapping the underlying locomotion backbone. Our results suggest that proprioceptive signals in payload-coupled interaction provide a scalable interface for partner-agnostic intent-aware collaborative transport.
title PAINT: Partner-Agnostic Intent-Aware Cooperative Transport with Legged Robots
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.12852