Closed-Loop Object-Informed Control for Non-Prehensile Robot Manipulation

Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) control is widely used in manipulation for its gradient-free, parallel handling of non-convex costs. Manipulation tasks, however, often impose constraints that hold throughout the motion: a closed kinematic chain that two grasping arms keep exactly, or joint limits and obstacle clearances that are never crossed. MPPI handles such constraints only through the cost, as soft penalties that hold approximately and fail under a strong task cost. To address this, we propose Projection-Retraction MPPI (PR-MPPI), which enforces the constraints inside the sampled dynamics. At every rollout step, the sampled velocity is projected to satisfy both constraint types: the equality restricts it to a subspace, and each inequality to a half-space within that subspace, so inequality handling never breaks the equality. This projection, however, satisfies the constraints only to first order, and a finite step leaves a small drift off the equality. Therefore, we retract the returned command back onto the constraint to numerical tolerance and independent of task weighting. We validate PR-MPPI on 14-DoF dual-arm systems. In simulation, the returned commands satisfy the closed-chain equality to numerical tolerance through a joint-limit stress test and randomized obstacle avoidance. On real hardware, the arms of a Unitree H1-2 humanoid reactively avoid a moving obstacle. Code and experiment videos are available at https://rcilab.github.io/prmppi.

Non-prehensile manipulation is essential for handling thin, large, or otherwise ungraspable objects in unstructured settings. Prior planning and search-based methods often rely on ad-hoc manual designs or generate physically unrealizable motions by ignoring critical gripper properties, while training-based approaches are data-intensive and struggle to generalize to novel, out-of-distribution tasks. We propose a library-driven hierarchical planner (LDHP) that makes executability a first-class design goal: a top-tier contact-state planner proposes object-pose paths using MoveObject primitives, and a bottom-tier grasp planner synthesizes feasible grasp sequences with AdjustGrasp primitives; feasibility is certified by collision checks and quasi-static mechanics, and contact-sensitive segments are recovered via a bounded dichotomy refinement. This gripper-aware decomposition decouples object motion from grasp realizability, yields a task-agnostic pipeline that transfers across manipulation tasks and geometric variations without re-design, and exposes clean hooks for optional learned priors. Real-robot studies on zero-mobility lifting and slot insertion demonstrate consistent execution and robustness to shape and environment changes.

What appears effortless to a human waiter remains a major challenge for robots. Manipulating objects nonprehensilely on a tray is inherently difficult, and the complexity is amplified in dual-arm settings. Such tasks are highly relevant to service robotics in domains such as hotels and hospitality, where robots must transport and reposition diverse objects with precision. We present DART, a novel dual-arm framework that integrates nonlinear Model Predictive Control (MPC) with an optimization-based impedance controller to achieve accurate object motion relative to a dynamically controlled tray. The framework systematically evaluates three complementary strategies for modeling tray-object dynamics as the state transition function within our MPC formulation: (i) a physics-based analytical model, (ii) an online regression based identification model that adapts in real-time, and (iii) a reinforcement learning-based dynamics model that generalizes across object properties. Our pipeline is validated in simulation with objects of varying mass, geometry, and friction coefficients. Extensive evaluations highlight the trade-offs among the three modeling strategies in terms of settling time, steady-state error, control effort, and generalization across objects. To the best of our knowledge, DART constitutes the first framework for non-prehensile dual-arm manipulation of objects on a tray. Project Link: https://dart-icra.github.io/dart/