Morphologically Equivariant Flow Matching for Bimanual Mobile Manipulation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Siebenborn, Max, Apraez, Daniel Ordoñez, Lueth, Sophie, Turrisi, Giulio, Pontil, Massimiliano, Semini, Claudio, Chalvatzaki, Georgia
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Siebenborn, Max
Apraez, Daniel Ordoñez
Lueth, Sophie
Turrisi, Giulio
Pontil, Massimiliano
Semini, Claudio
Chalvatzaki, Georgia
author_facet Siebenborn, Max
Apraez, Daniel Ordoñez
Lueth, Sophie
Turrisi, Giulio
Pontil, Massimiliano
Semini, Claudio
Chalvatzaki, Georgia
contents Mobile manipulation requires coordinated control of high-dimensional, bimanual robots. Imitation learning methods have been broadly used to solve these robotic tasks, yet typically ignore the bilateral morphological symmetry inherent in such systems. We argue that morphological symmetry is an underexplored but crucial inductive bias for learning in bimanual mobile manipulation: knowing how to solve a task in one configuration directly determines how to solve its mirrored counterpart. In this paper, we formalize this symmetry prior and show that it constrains optimal bimanual policies to be ambidextrous and equivariant under reflections across the robot's sagittal plane. We introduce a $\mathbb{C}_2$-equivariant flow matching policy that enforces reflective symmetry either via a regularized training loss or an equivariant velocity network. Across planar and 6-DoF mobile manipulation tasks, symmetry-informed policies consistently improve sample efficiency and achieve zero-shot generalization to mirrored configurations absent from the training distribution. We further validate this zero-shot generalization capability on a real-world manipulation task with a TIAGo++ robot. Together, our findings establish morphological symmetry as an effective, generalizable, and scalable inductive bias for ambidextrous generative policy learning.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_12228
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Morphologically Equivariant Flow Matching for Bimanual Mobile Manipulation
Siebenborn, Max
Apraez, Daniel Ordoñez
Lueth, Sophie
Turrisi, Giulio
Pontil, Massimiliano
Semini, Claudio
Chalvatzaki, Georgia
Robotics
Mobile manipulation requires coordinated control of high-dimensional, bimanual robots. Imitation learning methods have been broadly used to solve these robotic tasks, yet typically ignore the bilateral morphological symmetry inherent in such systems. We argue that morphological symmetry is an underexplored but crucial inductive bias for learning in bimanual mobile manipulation: knowing how to solve a task in one configuration directly determines how to solve its mirrored counterpart. In this paper, we formalize this symmetry prior and show that it constrains optimal bimanual policies to be ambidextrous and equivariant under reflections across the robot's sagittal plane. We introduce a $\mathbb{C}_2$-equivariant flow matching policy that enforces reflective symmetry either via a regularized training loss or an equivariant velocity network. Across planar and 6-DoF mobile manipulation tasks, symmetry-informed policies consistently improve sample efficiency and achieve zero-shot generalization to mirrored configurations absent from the training distribution. We further validate this zero-shot generalization capability on a real-world manipulation task with a TIAGo++ robot. Together, our findings establish morphological symmetry as an effective, generalizable, and scalable inductive bias for ambidextrous generative policy learning.
title Morphologically Equivariant Flow Matching for Bimanual Mobile Manipulation
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.12228