Ruscelli, Francesco
HYPERmotion: Learning Hybrid Behavior Planning for Autonomous Loco-manipulation
Wang, Jin, Dai, Rui, Wang, Weijie, Rossini, Luca, Ruscelli, Francesco, Tsagarakis, Nikos
Enabling robots to autonomously perform hybrid motions in diverse environments can be beneficial for long-horizon tasks such as material handling, household chores, and work assistance. This requires extensive exploitation of intrinsic motion capabilities, extraction of affordances from rich environmental information, and planning of physical interaction behaviors. Despite recent progress has demonstrated impressive humanoid whole-body control abilities, they struggle to achieve versatility and adaptability for new tasks. In this work, we propose HYPERmotion, a framework that learns, selects and plans behaviors based on tasks in different scenarios. We combine reinforcement learning with whole-body optimization to generate motion for 38 actuated joints and create a motion library to store the learned skills. We apply the planning and reasoning features of the large language models (LLMs) to complex loco-manipulation tasks, constructing a hierarchical task graph that comprises a series of primitive behaviors to bridge lower-level execution with higher-level planning. By leveraging the interaction of distilled spatial geometry and 2D observation with a visual language model (VLM) to ground knowledge into a robotic morphology selector to choose appropriate actions in single- or dual-arm, legged or wheeled locomotion. Experiments in simulation and real-world show that learned motions can efficiently adapt to new tasks, demonstrating high autonomy from free-text commands in unstructured scenes. Videos and website: hy-motion.github.io/
Design and Validation of a Multi-Arm Relocatable Manipulator for Space Applications
Hoffman, Enrico Mingo, Laurenzi, Arturo, Ruscelli, Francesco, Rossini, Luca, Baccelliere, Lorenzo, Antonucci, Davide, Margan, Alessio, Guria, Paolo, Migliorini, Marco, Cordasco, Stefano, Raiola, Gennaro, Muratore, Luca, Rodrigo, Joaquín Estremera, Rusconi, Andrea, Sangiovanni, Guido, Tsagarakis, Nikos G.
This work presents the computational design and validation of the Multi-Arm Relocatable Manipulator (MARM), a three-limb robot for space applications, with particular reference to the MIRROR (i.e., the Multi-arm Installation Robot for Readying ORUs and Reflectors) use-case scenario as proposed by the European Space Agency. A holistic computational design and validation pipeline is proposed, with the aim of comparing different limb designs, as well as ensuring that valid limb candidates enable MARM to perform the complex loco-manipulation tasks required. Motivated by the task complexity in terms of kinematic reachability, (self)-collision avoidance, contact wrench limits, and motor torque limits affecting Earth experiments, this work leverages on multiple state-of-art planning and control approaches to aid the robot design and validation. These include sampling-based planning on manifolds, non-linear trajectory optimization, and quadratic programs for inverse dynamics computations with constraints. Finally, we present the attained MARM design and conduct preliminary tests for hardware validation through a set of lab experiments.