让轮足机器人同时搬运多个球,突破传统机械抓取限制。
S2M-Trek: From Single to Multi-Sphere Transport via Per-Frame Deep Sets on a Wheel-Legged Robot

- 每帧独立处理球的无序性,避免历史拼接带来的排列偏差。
- 成功实现5个球100%不掉落的同步搬运,性能远超基线方法。
- 适合研究多智能体协同、机器人动态操控与物理仿真应用。
本文研究如何将动态运动操作从单个自由滚动球扩展到在无栅栏、无夹具的轮足四足机器人背部同时运输多个球。多个相同球构成无序集合,其顺序在每帧可能独立变化,形成独特的“每帧排列对称性”,而传统历史拼接式集合编码器仅强制全局对角排列对称性,导致训练中出现明显失败模式。在相同PPO训练预算下,扁平MLP和分支编码器仅能稳定在双球阶段,历史拼接深度集合基线( HCDS)除非在训练时随机分配球位,否则无法突破双球阶段,表明其依赖槽位索引作为学习捷径而非真正掌握无身份多球动力学。为此提出**每帧深度集合( PFDS)**,在每帧内进行排列不变池化后再做时序读出;理论上证明 PFDS 具有 $\Gframe$-不变性,并可通用逼近连续 $\Gframe$-不变策略。通过2×2消融实验分离架构与数据增强路径, PFDS 在模拟中实现五球100%无掉落运输,且在所有五组随机种子下表现一致。进一步通过DAgger将 PFDS 教师模型蒸馏为 TactSet,用16×16布尔接触图替代高维球状态观测,获得紧凑且天然具有 $\Gframe$-不变性的触觉表征。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
We study the problem of scaling dynamic loco-manipulation from a single free-rolling sphere to multiple spheres transported simultaneously on the back of a wheel-legged quadruped, without fences, grippers, or mechanical stops. Multiple identical free-rolling spheres form an unordered set with no persistent identity: their ordering may change independently at each history frame, creating a \emph{per-frame permutation symmetry} that standard history-concatenation set encoders do not explicitly enforce -- these encoders impose only a shared, diagonal permutation symmetry over the full history. We show that this symmetry mismatch leads to a concrete failure mode in curriculum-based reinforcement learning. Within the same PPO training budget, flat MLPs and branch-wise encoders plateau at or below the two-sphere stage, while a history-concatenation Deep Sets baseline (\HCDS) fails to progress past the two-sphere stage in our runs unless ball-to-slot assignments are randomised during training, suggesting that it exploits slot indices as a curriculum shortcut rather than learning identity-free multi-sphere dynamics. We propose \textbf{Per-Frame Deep Sets (\PFDS)}, which performs permutation-invariant pooling within each history frame before temporal readout; we prove that \PFDS is $\Gframe$-invariant and universally approximates continuous $\Gframe$-invariant policies. A $2{\times}2$ ablation over encoder architecture and slot randomisation separates the architectural and data-augmentation pathways, and \PFDS reaches the five-sphere stage with 100\% no-drop transport in simulation across all five random seeds. We further distill the \PFDS teacher into \TactSet via DAgger, replacing privileged sphere-state observations with a $16{\times}16$ Boolean union contact map, yielding a compact and naturally $\Gframe$-invariant tactile representation.
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