Learning Multi-Stage Pick-and-Place with a Legged Mobile Manipulator

Abstract

Quadruped-based mobile manipulation presents significant challenges in robotics due to the diversity of required skills, the extended task horizon, and partial observability. After presenting a multi-stage pick-and-place task as a succinct yet sufficiently rich setup that captures key desiderata for quadruped-based mobile manipulation, we propose an approach that can train a visuo-motor policy entirely in simulation, and achieve nearly 80\% success in the real world. The policy efficiently performs search, approach, grasp, transport, and drop into actions, with emerged behaviors such as re-grasping and task chaining. We conduct an extensive set of real-world experiments with ablation studies highlighting key techniques for efficient training and effective sim-to-real transfer. Additional experiments demonstrate deployment across a variety of indoor and outdoor environments. Demo videos and additional resources are available on the project page: https://horizonrobotics.github.io/gail/SLIM.