Paper Detail

Scalable Trajectory Generation for Whole-Body Mobile Manipulation

Yida Niu, Xinhai Chang, Xin Liu, Ziyuan Jiao, Yixin Zhu

arxiv Score 5.3

Published 2026-04-14 · First seen 2026-04-15

General AI

Abstract

Robots deployed in unstructured environments must coordinate whole-body motion -- simultaneously moving a mobile base and arm -- to interact with the physical world. This coupled mobility and dexterity yields a state space that grows combinatorially with scene and object diversity, demanding datasets far larger than those sufficient for fixed-base manipulation. Yet existing acquisition methods, including teleoperation and planning, are either labor-intensive or computationally prohibitive at scale. The core bottleneck is the lack of a scalable pipeline for generating large-scale, physically valid, coordinated trajectory data across diverse embodiments and environments. Here we introduce AutoMoMa, a GPU-accelerated framework that unifies AKR modeling, which consolidates base, arm, and object kinematics into a single chain, with parallelized trajectory optimization. AutoMoMa achieves 5,000 episodes per GPU-hour (over $80\times$ faster than CPU-based baselines), producing a dataset of over 500k physically valid trajectories spanning 330 scenes, diverse articulated objects, and multiple robot embodiments. Prior datasets were forced to compromise on scale, diversity, or kinematic fidelity; AutoMoMa addresses all three simultaneously. Training downstream IL policies further reveals that even a single articulated-object task requires tens of thousands of demonstrations for SOTA methods to reach $\approx 80\%$ success, confirming that data scarcity -- not algorithmic limitations -- has been the binding constraint. AutoMoMa thus bridges high-performance planning and reliable IL-based control, providing the infrastructure previously missing for coordinated mobile manipulation research. By making large-scale, kinematically valid training data practical, AutoMoMa showcases generalizable whole-body robot policies capable of operating in the diverse, unstructured settings of the real world.

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BibTeX

@article{niu2026scalable,
  title = {Scalable Trajectory Generation for Whole-Body Mobile Manipulation},
  author = {Yida Niu and Xinhai Chang and Xin Liu and Ziyuan Jiao and Yixin Zhu},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Robots deployed in unstructured environments must coordinate whole-body motion -- simultaneously moving a mobile base and arm -- to interact with the physical world. This coupled mobility and dexterity yields a state space that grows combinatorially with scene and object diversity, demanding datasets far larger than those sufficient for fixed-base manipulation. Yet existing acquisition methods, including teleoperation and planning, are either labor-intensive or computationally prohibitive at sca},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.12565},
  keywords = {cs.RO, cs.CV},
  eprint = {2604.12565},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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