Keep it Upright: Model Predictive Control for Nonprehensile Object Transportation with Obstacle Avoidance on a Mobile Manipulator
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We consider a nonprehensile manipulation task in which a mobile manipulator must balance objects on its end effector without grasping them -- known as the waiter's problem -- and move to a desired location while avoiding static and dynamic obstacles. In constrast to existing approaches, our focus is on fast online planning in response to new and changing environments. Our main contribution is a whole-body constrained model predictive controller (MPC) for a mobile manipulator that balances objects and avoids collisions. Furthermore, we propose planning using the minimum statically-feasible friction coefficients, which provides robustness to frictional uncertainty and other force disturbances while also substantially reducing the compute time required to update the MPC policy. Simulations and hardware experiments on a velocity-controlled mobile manipulator with up to seven balanced objects, stacked objects, and various obstacles show that our approach can handle a variety of conditions that have not been previously demonstrated, with end effector speeds and accelerations up to 2.0 m/s and 7.9 m/s$^2$, respectively. Notably, we demonstrate a projectile avoidance task in which the robot avoids a thrown ball while balancing a tall bottle.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".