Tianyuan Miao | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

Manipulation Feasible Navigation Among Movable Obstacles with Discrete Contact Pushing

In environments with large movable obstacles, detour-only navigation can be inefficient or even infeasible, while obstacle interaction requires reasoning about navigation benefit, feasible placement, and executable manipulation. We present a hierarchical navigation among movable obstacles (NAMO) framework for mobile manipulators. At the high level, the planner identifies key blocking obstacles from reference paths and searches for relocation plans that jointly satisfy geometric, manipulation, and downstream navigation constraints. When direct relocation is hindered by other movable objects, a large language model (LLM) is selectively invoked to infer auxiliary manipulation dependencies, which are then verified by deterministic geometric planning. To execute the resulting relocation goals, we define discrete contact modes on the surfaces of box-shaped obstacles and select contact faces and regions online based on position and orientation errors, enabling straight, side, and corner pushing through contact switching. A recurrent reinforcement-learning policy coordinates the mobile base and manipulator to track tool center point (TCP) targets while preserving end-effector reachability during sustained pushing. Simulation and real-robot experiments demonstrate feasible navigation-manipulation in detour, single- and multi-obstacle relocation, and dependency-constrained scenarios, validating the framework for interactive navigation with large non-graspable obstacles. The open-source project is available at https://cloudytosunny.github.io/NAMO_DCPushing/.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2024

Learning Multimodal Confidence for Intention Recognition in Human-Robot Interaction

The rapid development of collaborative robotics has provided a new possibility of helping the elderly who has difficulties in daily life, allowing robots to operate according to specific intentions. However, efficient human-robot cooperation requires natural, accurate and reliable intention recognition in shared environments. The current paramount challenge for this is reducing the uncertainty of multimodal fused intention to be recognized and reasoning adaptively a more reliable result despite current interactive condition. In this work we propose a novel learning-based multimodal fusion framework Batch Multimodal Confidence Learning for Opinion Pool (BMCLOP). Our approach combines Bayesian multimodal fusion method and batch confidence learning algorithm to improve accuracy, uncertainty reduction and success rate given the interactive condition. In particular, the generic and practical multimodal intention recognition framework can be easily extended further. Our desired assistive scenarios consider three modalities gestures, speech and gaze, all of which produce categorical distributions over all the finite intentions. The proposed method is validated with a six-DoF robot through extensive experiments and exhibits high performance compared to baselines.

cs.RO↗