COWBOY: A Scalable Sim-to-Real Framework for Learning Contextual Whole-Body Manipulation

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Article Summary

Mobile manipulators must adapt not only to objects, but also to the spatial context in which they appear: where to position the base, how to manipulate, and where to look while navigating surrounding scene geometry. To address this, we present COWBOY, a scalable sim-to-real framework for learning such contextual whole-body manipulation. On whole-body dexterous grasping, COWBOY transfers zero-shot to hundreds of objects and diverse in-the-wild scenes, spanning cluttered tabletops, shelves, drawers, and other unstructured settings. Rather than learning scene adaptation directly with RL in simulation, a vectorized environment-aware whole-body controller (WBC) handles reaching in thousands of scenes by coordinating base-arm motion, collision avoidance, and active vision. Then, local RL experts are trained in local scenes for object interaction and can be reused across thousands of full-scene layouts. We distill these composed WBC-RL teachers into a single vision policy that controls the mobile base, arm, dexterous hand, and actuated camera from point-cloud observations. The resulting policy exhibits contextual whole-body behavior, automatically adapting base placement, camera viewpoint, arm trajectory, and grasp strategy to observed scene and object geometry. Videos are available at https://cowboy-manip.com

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