Pedipulate: Enabling Manipulation Skills using a Quadruped Robot's Leg
Authors: Philip Arm, Mayank Mittal, Hendrik Kolvenbach, and Marco Hutter
Video
Abstract
Legged robots have the potential to become vital in maintenance, home support, and exploration scenarios. In order to interact with and manipulate their environments, most legged robots are equipped with a dedicated robot arm, which means additional mass and mechanical complexity compared to standard legged robots. In this work, we explore pedipulation - using the legs of a legged robot for manipulation. By training a reinforcement learning policy that tracks position targets for one foot, we enable a dedicated pedipulation controller that is robust to disturbances, has a large workspace through whole-body behaviors, and can even reach far-away targets with gait emergence, enabling loco-pedipulation. By deploying our controller on a quadrupedal robot using teleoperation, we demonstrate various real-world tasks such as door opening, sample collection, and pushing obstacles. We demonstrate load carrying of more than 2.0 kg at the foot. Additionally, the controller is robust to interaction forces at the foot, disturbances at the base, and slippery contact surfaces.
Our approach is useful in multiple real-world applications:
Door Opening
Opening a Fridge
Object Transport
Pressing a Button
Pushing an Obstacle
Rock Sample Collection
Our controller is robust to disturbances and slippery surfaces: