ALORE: Autonomous Large-Object Rearrangement with a Legged Manipulator

TL;DR

ALORE introduces an autonomous system enabling legged robots to efficiently rearrange large objects like furniture through hierarchical reinforcement learning, advanced planning, and real-world validation, significantly improving multi-object rearrangement tasks.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel integrated system combining hierarchical reinforcement learning, a unified interaction representation, and task-and-motion planning for large-object rearrangement by legged robots.

Findings

Superior policy generalization and object velocity tracking accuracy.

Effective rearrangement of 32 chairs over 40 minutes without failure.

Successful long-distance autonomous rearrangement over 40 meters.

Abstract

Endowing robots with the ability to rearrange various large and heavy objects, such as furniture, can substantially alleviate human workload. However, this task is extremely challenging due to the need to interact with diverse objects and efficiently rearrange multiple objects in complex environments while ensuring collision-free loco-manipulation. In this work, we present ALORE, an autonomous large-object rearrangement system for a legged manipulator that can rearrange various large objects across diverse scenarios. The proposed system is characterized by three main features: (i) a hierarchical reinforcement learning training pipeline for multi-object environment learning, where a high-level object velocity controller is trained on top of a low-level whole-body controller to achieve efficient and stable joint learning across multiple objects; (ii) two key modules, a unified interaction configuration representation and an object velocity estimator, that allow a single policy to regulate planar velocity of diverse objects accurately; and (iii) a task-and-motion planning framework that jointly optimizes object visitation order and object-to-target assignment, improving task efficiency while enabling online replanning. Comparisons against strong baselines show consistent superiority in policy generalization, object-velocity tracking accuracy, and multi-object rearrangement efficiency. Key modules are systematically evaluated, and extensive simulations and real-world experiments are conducted to validate the robustness and effectiveness of the entire system, which successfully completes 8 continuous loops to rearrange 32 chairs over nearly 40 minutes without a single failure, and executes long-distance autonomous rearrangement over an approximately 40 m route. The open-source packages are available at https://zhihaibi.github.io/Alore/.