In this paper, we propose ThinkLocoManip, an agentic harness for legged loco-manipulation designed to tackle complex, long-horizon tasks in large-scale environments. Existing approaches typically follow either direct action generation or a plan-then-act paradigm, both of which can struggle with the generalization and error-recovery capabilities required for extended task execution. In contrast, ThinkLocoManip adopts an interleaved reasoning-and-acting paradigm, allowing the agent to continuously reason about its current state, execute actions, observe their outcomes, and adapt its strategy accordingly. Building on this paradigm, our agentic harness orchestrates a suite of specialized tools for perception, navigation, manipulation, and locomotion, enabling flexible composition of heterogeneous capabilities. Unlike existing robotic agentic harnesses, ThinkLocoManip explicitly incorporates locomotion as a tool domain for agent reasoning and execution. We further design a set of skills that explicitly account for both tool usage within each functional domain and coordination across domains, supporting effective execution of complex behaviors over long horizons. To tackle task failure during long-horizon interactions, we develop keyframe thinking mechanism to preserve critical execution context and support efficient error recovery. Extensive real-world experiments demonstrate that ThinkLocoManip substantially outperforms representative methods based on both direct action generation and plan-then-act paradigms across challenging long-horizon legged loco-manipulation tasks. Notably, ThinkLocoManip achieves a success rate of 77%, more than twice that of the strongest plan-then-act baseline (37.1%). Our experiments further validate the effectiveness of interleaved reasoning and acting, tool orchestration, and coordinated skill execution.
Figures & tables
Fig. 1: (a) An overview of our method for indoor and in-the-wild loco-manipulation tasks. (b) Performance comparison of long-horizon real-world tasks.
Fig. 2: The Comparison of different frameworks for legged loco-manipulation . (a) direct action generation method uses an end-to-end policy to map observations directly to robot actions. (b) plan-then-act method constructs a tool invoking plans and then execute each tool. (c) Our approach design an agentic harness, enabling interleaved reasoning-and-acting.
Fig. 3: The overall framework of our method . (a) The agent performs task planning to understand task instruction and decompose it into several sub-tasks. (b) ThinkLocoManip orchestrates a suite of Primitive Tools for perception, navigation, manipulation, and locomotion. We also design ThinkLocoManip-Skill that explicitly accounts for both tool usage within each functional domain and coordination across domains. (c) Keyframe Thinking mechanism enables error recovery from task failure. (d) The whole execution workflow of our method.
Primitive Tool
Function
Perception
Capture Image
Take RGB/Depth Image using camera.
Prompt Detection
Detect the object matching the prompt.
Navigation
Map-based Nav
Navigate to waypoint based on 3D Map.
Target-based Nav
Navigate to (x,y,z) in the robot’s base frame.
TABLE I: Library of Primitive Tools.
Fig. 4: The system setup and execution process of five real-world indoor tasks . (a) We demonstrate the robot and objects used in the experiment. (b)-(f) We conduct experiments on five indoor tasks, illustrating the complete execution process from navigation to task completion and demonstrating the effectiveness of our agentic harness framework.
Method
Table Grasping
Ground Grasping
Button Pressing
Chest Manip.
Cabinet Manip.
Avg.
Succ
TaskC (%)
Succ
TaskC (%)
Succ
TaskC (%)
Succ
TaskC (%)
Succ
TaskC (%)
SuccR (%)
TaskC (%)
ACT
4/20
40.0
5/20
43.8
0/10
33.3
3/10
44.0
1/10
28.0
18.6
37.8
π0.5
6/20
47.5
6/20
47.5
0/10
33.3
3/10
47.5
2/10
40.0
24.3
43.2
plan-then-act
10/20
62.5
7/20
51.3
4/10
60.0
2/10
48.0
3/10
56.0
37.1
55.6
Ours
17/20
88.8
18/20
92.5
8/10
86.7
6/10
72.0
5/10
66.0
77.0
81.2
TABLE II: Performance comparison on real-world long-horizon loco-manipulation tasks. We color the best and second best results. The improvement in average success rate over the second-best method is shown in parentheses.
Department of Computer Science, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK · Human-Robot Interfaces and Interaction Laboratory, Italian Institute of Technology, Genoa, Italy