RMMI: Enhanced Obstacle Avoidance for Reactive Mobile Manipulation using an Implicit Neural Map

Abstract

We introduce RMMI, a novel reactive control framework for mobile manipulators operating in complex, static environments. Our approach leverages a neural Signed Distance Field (SDF) to model intricate environment details and incorporates this representation as inequality constraints within a Quadratic Program (QP) to coordinate robot joint and base motion. A key contribution is the introduction of an active collision avoidance cost term that maximises the total robot distance to obstacles during the motion. We first evaluate our approach in a simulated reaching task, outperforming previous methods that rely on representing both the robot and the scene as a set of primitive geometries. Compared with the baseline, we improved the task success rate by 25% in total, which includes increases of 10% by using the active collision cost. We also demonstrate our approach on a real-world platform, showing its effectiveness in reaching target poses in cluttered and confined spaces using environment models built directly from sensor data




Video

Robot representation
Primitives 9476 Points 2358 Points Spheres
Robot Mesh

Collision representation
Interactive
Real-World Experiments
Scenes
Table Bookshelf Cabinet
Approach
No Collision Avoidance Only Inequality Ours