OmniDP: Beyond-FOV Large-Workspace Humanoid Manipulation with Omnidirectional 3D Perception
Authors: Pei Qu, Zheng Li, Yufei Jia, Ziyun Liu, Liang Zhu, Haoang Li, Jinni Zhou, Jun Ma
Organizations: 1The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou). · 2Tsinghua University. · 3The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
The deployment of humanoid robots for dexterous manipulation in unstructured environments remains challenging due to perceptual limitations that constrain the effective workspace. In scenarios where physical constraints prevent the robot from repositioning itself, maintaining omnidirectional awareness becomes far more critical than color or semantic information.While recent advances in visuomotor policy learning have improved manipulation capabilities, conventional RGB-D solutions suffer from narrow fields of view (FOV) and self-occlusion, requiring frequent base movements that introduce motion uncertainty and safety risks. Existing approaches to expanding perception, including active vision systems and third-view cameras, introduce mechanical complexity, calibration dependencies, and latency that hinder reliable real-time performance. In this work, We propose OmniDP, an end-to-end LiDAR-driven 3D visuomotor policy that enables robust manipulation in large workspaces. Our method processes panoramic point clouds through a Time-Aware Attention Pooling mechanism, efficiently encoding sparse 3D data while capturing temporal dependencies. This 360° perception allows the robot to interact with objects across wide areas without frequent repositioning. To support policy learning, we develop a whole-body teleoperation system for efficient data collection on full-body coordination. Extensive experiments in simulation and real-world environments show that OmniDP achieves robust performance in large-workspace and cluttered scenarios, outperforming baselines that rely on egocentric depth cameras.
Figures & tables
Fig. 1 : OmniDP. (a) The narrow field of view of RGB-D cameras prevents perception of objects outside visual range, causing task failures and collisions in space-constrained environments where robot repositioning is difficult; (b) by utilizing panoramic 3D LiDAR perception, our approach empowers humanoid robots with the capability to perform manipulation tasks across a large workspace, including areas outside the camera’s visual blind spots.
Fig. 2 : Overview of system architecture. Our system consists of four key components: (i) the panoramic perception hardware platform based on a Unitree G1 humanoid robot equipped with a Mid-360 LiDAR; (ii) a whole-body teleoperation system for efficient demonstration data collection; (iii) an end-to-end visuomotor policy learning method leveraging omnidirectional 3D perception with time-aware encoding; and (iv) real-world deployment enabling large-workspace manipulation and omnidirectional obstacle avoidance.
Fig. 3 : Comparison of the field of views of LiDAR and camera. (a) The panoramic LiDAR provides 360° horizontal coverage, significantly surpassing the narrow field of view of the head-mounted RGB-D camera. (b) This enables the robot to perceive global scene context and locate target objects even when they lie outside the camera’s visual blind spots, which is essential for large-workspace manipulation tasks.
Simulation
Real World
Method
Pick & Place
Pour (OV)
Pick & Place
Hand Over (OV)
Pour (OV)
Wipe (OV)
Total
DP
10/20
0/20
8/20
0/20
0/20
0/20
18/120
DP3
13/20
0/20
9/20
0/20
0/20
0/20
22/120
iDP3
14/20
0/20
11/20
0/20
0/20
0/20
25/120
Ours
16/20
12/20
15/20
12/20
11/20
16/20
82/120
TABLE I : Performance comparison. Our method consistently outperforms existing RGB-based and depth-to-point-cloud baselines across all simulated and real-world tasks, with particularly significant advantages in scenarios where target objects lie outside the camera’s field of view.
Fig. 4 : Simulation experiments and snapshots. We evaluate OmniDP on two simulated tasks, demonstrating its effectiveness in large-workspace manipulation scenarios with panoramic perception.
Fig. 5 : Real-world experiments and snapshots. We further validate OmniDP on four real-world tasks, confirming its robust performance in real-world environments and out-of-view manipulation scenarios.
Method
Success Rate ↑
Collision Rate ↓
DP
0/20
20/20
DP3
0/20
18/20
iDP3
0/20
18/20
Ours
14/20
5/20
TABLE II : Collision-free manipulation evaluation. Results demonstrate that OmniDP achieves robust omnidirectional obstacle avoidance in cluttered environments.
Method
Instance
Lighting
Scene
DP
3/20
4/20
2/20
DP3
7/20
8/20
7/20
iDP3
12/20
12/20
10/20
Ours
13/20
15/20
12/20
TABLE III : Generalization capability evaluation. Results demonstrate that OmniDP maintains consistently high success rates across varying object instances, lighting conditions, and cluttered scenes.
Fig. 6 : Capabilities evaluation. We test OmniDP under diverse challenging conditions: (a) omnidirectional obstacle avoidance, where obstacles are placed outside the camera’s field of view; (b) varying object instances with different shapes and sizes; (c) changing lighting conditions, including low-light and complex lighting; and (d) cluttered environments with multiple distractor objects.
Ablation
Success Rate
OmniDP
12/20
w/o Omni. Obs.
0/20
w/o TAP
9/20
TABLE IV : Ablation study. The results confirm the necessity of the designed components.