MAAP: Multi-Agent Active Perception for Collaborative Manipulation
Organizations: Carnegie Mellon University · Shanghai Jiao Tong University · University of Science and Technology of China · The University of Hong Kong · Sun Yat-sen University · The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen
Abstract
Multi-agent manipulation naturally produces multiple task-driven viewpoints: every arm carries a wrist camera and moves through the scene while acting. Yet these observations are typically underutilized, and active perception in manipulation is still often treated as requiring a dedicated sensing agent. We introduce MAAP (Multi-Agent Active Perception), in which every arm is dual-purpose: it executes manipulation actions and, through the wrist camera it carries, simultaneously serves as a moving viewpoint for the team. We pair this with RAIL (Role-Aware Imitation Learning), a controller that predicts each arm's current role alongside its action chunk and conditions action generation on it, representing role-dependent actions within one network. Across four simulated tasks, widening the perception regime lifts average success from 56.5% with a fixed camera to 62.5% with one active wrist view and 70.0% with all of them, while MAAP+RAIL reaches 79.2%. RAIL's additional gain is concentrated on the three-arm Microwave task, where success rises from 47% to 82% on identical multi-wrist inputs. On a dual-arm platform, MAAP+RAIL succeeds in 14 of 20 placement trials compared with 0 of 20 for fixed-view ACT. Collaborative manipulation can thus serve as an active perception mechanism in its own right.
Figures & tables
| Task | GV | SAV | MAAP | MAAP+RAIL |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Real: dual-arm ARX, 20 trials | ||||
| Place Blocked Cube | 0 | – | – | 70 |
| Simulation: RoboFactory, 100 episodes | ||||
| Stack Cube | 8 | 37 | 34 | 35 |
| Pick from Pot | 86 | 99 | 99 | 100 |
| Pick from Microwave | 32 | 14 | 47 | 82 |
| Task | MV | SF | CF | DCF |
| Stack Cube | 34 | 51 | 11 | 34 |
| Pick from Pot | 99 | 99 | 85 | 80 |
| Pick from Microwave | 47 | 42 | 0 | 69 |
| Place on Cart | 100 | 100 | 0 | 99 |
| Average | 70.0 | 73.0 | 24.0 | 70.5 |