Loco-manipulation

Coordinating leg movement and arm manipulation together as one problem, so the robot works while it moves.

“Loco-manipulation” combines locomotion and manipulation: it means a legged robot, such as a quadruped with an arm or a humanoid, treats moving and manipulating as a single, unified problem, such as squatting down to pick up a box off the floor, or pushing a cart while walking. This differs from ordinary mobile manipulation: an arm on a wheeled base can move first, stop, and then manipulate, but a legged robot's legs are themselves involved in balance and force generation, so moving the arm shifts the center of mass and the whole body must coordinate. Zipeng Fu, Xuxin Cheng, and Deepak Pathak's Deep Whole-Body Control (CoRL 2022) points out that controlling legs and arms separately requires heavy engineering to coordinate and lets errors propagate between modules, so they instead use a single reinforcement-learning policy to control both the legs and arm of an armed quadruped at once. On the humanoid side, HOMIE (2025) controls walking with foot pedals, the arms with an isomorphic exoskeleton, and the fingers with a data glove, letting a humanoid walk, squat, and manipulate objects all at once. This is a key capability for humanoid robots moving into homes and factories.

ExampleA humanoid robot walks up to a shelf, squats down to pick up a box from the bottom shelf, then stands up and carries the box to a cart while walking.

Also called

Whole-body Loco-manipulation

Related

Mobile Manipulation · Whole-Body Control · Legged Locomotion · Humanoid Robot · Legged Mobile Manipulator (Quadruped with Arm) · HOMIE

Sources

Deep Whole-Body Control: Learning a Unified Policy for Manipulation and Locomotion (CoRL 2022)
HOMIE: Humanoid Loco-Manipulation with Isomorphic Exoskeleton Cockpit