Quadrupedal robots have emerged as versatile agents capable of locomoting and manipulating in complex environments. Traditional designs typically rely on the robot's inherent body parts or incorporate top-mounted arms for manipulation tasks. However, these configurations may limit the robot's operational dexterity, efficiency and adaptability, particularly in cluttered or constrained spaces. In this work, we present LocoMan, a dexterous quadrupedal robot with a novel morphology to perform versatile manipulation in diverse constrained environments. By equipping a Unitree Go1 robot with two low-cost and lightweight modular 3-DoF loco-manipulators on its front calves, LocoMan leverages the combined mobility and functionality of the legs and grippers for complex manipulation tasks that require precise 6D positioning of the end effector in a wide workspace. To harness the loco-manipulation capabilities of LocoMan, we introduce a unified control framework that extends the whole-body controller (WBC) to integrate the dynamics of loco-manipulators. Through experiments, we validate that the proposed whole-body controller can accurately and stably follow desired 6D trajectories of the end effector and torso, which, when combined with the large workspace from our design, facilitates a diverse set of challenging dexterous loco-manipulation tasks in confined spaces, such as opening doors, plugging into sockets, picking objects in narrow and low-lying spaces, and bimanual manipulation.

翻译：四足机器人已成为能够在复杂环境中运动和操作的多能机器人平台。传统设计通常依赖机器人本体部位或顶部安装的机械臂执行操作任务，但这些配置可能限制机器人在杂乱或受限空间中的操作灵巧性、效率与适应性。本文提出LocoMan——一款具有新颖形态的灵巧四足机器人，能够在多种受限环境下进行多能操作。通过在Unitree Go1机器人的前小腿上安装两个低成本、轻量化的模块化三自由度足臂操作器，LocoMan将腿部与夹爪的联合移动性和功能性相结合，可在广阔工作空间内实现需要末端执行器精确六维定位的复杂操作任务。为充分发挥LocoMan的足臂操作能力，我们引入统一控制框架，扩展全身控制器以集成足臂操作器的动力学特性。实验表明，所提出的全身控制器能够精确稳定地跟踪末端执行器和躯干的期望六维轨迹，结合设计带来的大工作空间，可在受限空间中完成一系列高难度灵巧足臂操作任务，例如开门、插拔插座、在狭窄低矮空间中拾取物体以及双臂协同操作。