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arXiv · 2610.23883

Learning Whole-Body Kinetic Coordination for Wheeled-Quadruped Long-Range Throwing

Abstract

Long-range throwing on unstructured terrain is a key capability for mobile robots in delivery and retrieval tasks, but it requires high release velocity, coordinated whole-body motion, and robustness to terrain-induced disturbances. We present a whole-body kinetic-coordination framework for a wheeled-quadruped manipulator that combines kinetic-chain arm modeling with SQP-based trajectory optimization and a reference-guided reinforcement learning policy for coordinated base motion. The manipulator is first reduced to a kinetic-chain model and optimized under kinematic and dynamic constraints to produce a high-speed throwing reference. On a stationary base, the optimized arm trajectory reaches a release speed of 12.75 m/s and a throwing distance of 16.68 m. When whole-body coordination is enabled, the system further increases the release speed to 16.64 m/s and the throwing distance to 28.25 m. We then integrate the mobility of the wheeled-quadruped platform and validate the complete policy through hardware experiments on flat ground, grass, slopes, and rough roads. The results show that kinetic-chain optimization and whole-body coordination together enable robust long-range throwing across diverse unstructured terrains.

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Qinglian Wu, Yidian Hu, Weiqi Fan, Yutian Zhang, Siyuan Ma, Jiaqi Zhai, Wei Dong, Li Xu. 2026-08-28. Learning Whole-Body Kinetic Coordination for Wheeled-Quadruped Long-Range Throwing. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23883

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