RM-Planner: Integrating Reinforcement Learning with Whole-Body Model Predictive Control for Mobile Manipulation

Abstract

Mobile manipulation is a crucial problem in various real-world applications. However, existing methods have demonstrated unsatisfactory training efficiency and sparse rewards, requiring complex coordination strategies between the mobile base and arm. In this paper, we propose RM-Planner, a planning method for mobile manipulation tasks in unknown complex environments. By adopting a two-layer hierarchical framework, we utilize a whole-body Model Predictive Control (MPC)-based low-level planner to track subgoals and generate aggressive but safe joint commands throughout the entire manipulation process, while a Reinforcement Learning (RL)based high-level policy directly uses 3D point cloud representations of the environment, guiding the robot to achieve optimal manipulation postures based on current observations and specific task objectives. We conduct extensive simulations and real-world experiments, where RM-planner significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Our code will be released at https://github.com/SYSU-RoboticsLab/RM-Planner.git.