MLM: Learning Multi-task Loco-Manipulation Whole-Body Control for Quadruped Robot with Arm

TL;DR

This paper introduces MLM, a reinforcement learning framework enabling quadruped robots with arms to perform multiple loco-manipulation tasks through a curriculum-based, multi-task learning approach that transfers from simulation to real-world deployment.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel multi-task reinforcement learning framework with a trajectory library and a trajectory-velocity prediction network for quadruped robots with arms, enabling efficient multi-task control and zero-shot transfer.

Findings

Successful simulation of whole-body behaviors

Zero-shot transfer to real-world robot

Effective multi-task loco-manipulation performance

Abstract

Whole-body loco-manipulation for quadruped robots with arms remains a challenging problem, particularly in achieving multi-task control. To address this, we propose MLM, a reinforcement learning framework driven by both real-world and simulation data. It enables a six-DoF robotic arm-equipped quadruped robot to perform whole-body loco-manipulation for multiple tasks autonomously or under human teleoperation. To address the problem of balancing multiple tasks during the learning of loco-manipulation, we introduce a trajectory library with an adaptive, curriculum-based sampling mechanism. This approach allows the policy to efficiently leverage real-world collected trajectories for learning multi-task loco-manipulation. To address deployment scenarios with only historical observations and to enhance the performance of policy execution across tasks with different spatial ranges, we propose a Trajectory-Velocity Prediction policy network. It predicts unobservable future trajectories and velocities. By leveraging extensive simulation data and curriculum-based rewards, our controller achieves whole-body behaviors in simulation and zero-shot transfer to real-world deployment. Ablation studies in simulation verify the necessity and effectiveness of our approach, while real-world experiments on a Go2 robot with an Airbot robotic arm demonstrate the policy's good performance in multi-task execution.