Authors: Michal Ciebielski, Shafeef Omar, Aaron Johnson, Majid Khadiv
Organizations: Munich Institute of Robotics and Machine Intelligence (MIRMI), Technical University of Munich (TUM), Germany. · Institute for Advanced Study, Technical University of Munich, Garching, Germany. · Department of Mechanical Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA.
Fast planning of novel behaviors in unseen scenarios remains a fundamental challenge in robotics. The high-dimensional, hybrid, and underactuated nature of humanoid loco-manipulation continues to hinder the realization of this goal. In this paper, we address this challenge by proposing a nested kino-dynamic framework for rapid feasibility checking and dynamically consistent trajectory generation given a candidate contact sequence. By integrating this module with a feasibility-guided tree search and a Large Language Model (LLM)-based contact plan sampling strategy, we demonstrate that the proposed framework can substantially improve the search process. Furthermore, we show that the generated trajectories can be tracked using a reinforcement learning (RL)-based controller and show that the resulting trajectories are of sufficiently high quality for execution in real-world loco-manipulation scenarios. A supplementary video is available at: https://youtu.be/R6qCHoCormQ.