IROS Best Paper Award on Mobile Manipulation

 IROS Best Paper Award on Mobile Manipulation

Prof. Xiaolong Wang and his student Ruihan Yang won the IROS Best Paper Award on Mobile Manipulation. 

This is an award out of 3645 submissions at IROS this year. It is a collaboration with Ruihan interning at AI2 last year.

Paper: Harmonic Mobile Manipulation https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.06639

Abstract: Recent advancements in robotics have enabled robots to navigate complex scenes or manipulate diverse objects independently. However, robots are still impotent in many household tasks requiring coordinated behaviors such as opening doors. The factorization of navigation and manipulation, while effective for some tasks, fails in scenarios requiring coordinated actions. To address this challenge, we introduce, HarmonicMM, an end-to-end learning method that optimizes both navigation and manipulation, showing notable improvement over existing techniques in everyday tasks. This approach is validated in simulated and real-world environments and adapts to novel unseen settings without additional tuning. Our contributions include a new benchmark for mobile manipulation and the successful deployment with only RGB visual observation in a real unseen apartment, demonstrating the potential for practical indoor robot deployment in daily life. More results are on our project site: https://rchalyang.github.io/HarmonicMM/