HANDO: Hierarchical Autonomous Navigation and Dexterous Omni-loco-manipulation

Sun, Jingyuan, Wang, Chaoran, Zhang, Mingyu, Miao, Cui, Ji, Hongyu, Qu, Zihan, Sun, Han, Wang, Bing, Si, Qingyi

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence 

Seamless loco-manipulation in unstructured environments requires robots to leverage autonomous exploration alongside whole-body control for physical interaction. In this work, we introduce HANDO (Hierarchical Autonomous Navigation and Dexterous Omni-loco-manipulation), a two-layer framework designed for legged robots equipped with manipulators to perform human-centered mobile manipulation tasks. The first layer utilizes a goal-conditioned autonomous exploration policy to guide the robot to semantically specified targets, such as a black office chair in a dynamic environment. The second layer employs a unified whole-body loco-manipulation policy to coordinate the arm and legs for precise interaction tasks-for example, handing a drink to a person seated on the chair. We have conducted an initial deployment of the navigation module, and will continue to pursue finer-grained deployment of whole-body loco-manipulation.