cs.ROOct 14, 2026

RoboSpan: Learning Modular Coordination Policies for High-DoF Whole-Body Mobile Manipulation with Teleoperation

Authors: Keqiang Ren, Xuecheng Ye, Hanyu Liu, Zhihua Wang, Tao Jian, Yunsheng Ma, Jiayi Wen, Xinran Li, 

Organizations: Jiangsu Key Laboratory of Advanced Food Manufacturing Equipment and Technology, School of Mechanical Engineering, Jiangnan University, Wuxi 214122, China.

Abstract

Whole-body mobile manipulation suffers from two fundamental challenges: inherent motion heterogeneity across locomotion, arm, and hand modules, and progressive error accumulation over long-horizon multi-stage tasks. Existing teleoperation platforms also lack integrated dexterous tactile sensing to support coordinated whole-body decision-making. This paper presents RoboSpan, a high-DoF whole-body teleoperation and demonstration platform, and the Hierarchical Modular Framework (HMF) for learning modular coordination policies. HMF functionally decouples the 29-DoF action space into fine hand manipulation, arm pose adjustment, and mobile-base spatial configuration branches, and introduces the Coordinated Modular Embodied Transformer (COMET) with inter-modular cross-attention to enable dynamic information exchange and action coordination. Vision-language model driven hierarchical task decomposition structurally suppresses temporal error propagation, while a full-palm 2D tactile representation encodes distributed contact signals for cross-module tactile empowerment. Experiments on a physical 29-DoF robot demonstrate that the proposed method achieves over 20% higher task success rate than mainstream baselines across a range of long-horizon whole-body tasks, markedly improving stability and robustness in contact-rich manipulation.

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