Victor Levé, Joao Moura, Steve Tonneau, Sachiya Fujita, Tamon Miyake and Sethu Vijayakumar, Scaling Whole-body Multi-contact Manipulation with Contact Optimization, Proc. IEEE-RAS 24th International Conference on Humanoid Robots (Humanoids 2025), Seoul, Korea (2025). [pdf] [video] [citation]
Wednesday, October 1 at 10:00-11:00, Paper WI2C.31 (in ASEM Ballroom Lobby)
Daily tasks require us to use our whole body to manipulate objects, for instance when our hands are unavailable. We consider the issue of providing humanoid robots with the ability to autonomously perform similar whole-body manipulation tasks. In this context, the infinite possibilities for where and how contact can occur on the robot and object surfaces hinder the scalability of existing planning methods, which predominantly rely on discrete sampling. Given the continuous nature of contact surfaces, gradient-based optimization offers a more suitable approach for finding solutions. However, a key remaining challenge is the lack of an efficient representation of robot surfaces. In this work, we propose (i) arepresentation of robot and object surfaces that enables closedform computation of proximity points, and (ii) a cost design that effectively guides whole-body manipulation planning. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed framework can solve problems unaddressed by existing methods, and achieves a 77% improvement in planning time over the state of the art. We also validate the suitability of our approach on real hardware through the whole-body manipulation of boxes by a humanoid robot.
Accepted workshop papers
Wanming Yu, Adrian Röfer, Abhinav Valada and Sethu Vijayakumar Preference-Based Long-Horizon Robotic Stacking with Multimodal Large Language Models Bridging Humanoid Robotics and Foundation Models: Embodied Intelligence and AI Integration
Andreas Christou, Elliot Lister, Georgia Andreopoulou, Don Mahad and Sethu Vijayakumar Assist-as-needed Control for FES in Foot Drop Management Assistive Robotics for Caregiving workshop
Marina Y. Aoyama, Sethu Vijayakumar, and Tetsuya Narita Few-Shot Learning of Tool-Use Skills with Proximity and Tactile Sensing Dextrous Humanoid Manipulation