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arXiv · 2610.32271

From Tabletop to Walking Bot: Deploying a VLA Model on a Legged Manipulator Robot

Giovanni Minelli·Antonio Langella·Giovanni B. Dessy·Lorenzo Amatucci·Giulio Turrisi·Victor Barasuol·Claudio Semini
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Abstract

Vision-language-action (VLA) models are typically pretrained on broad, diverse datasets and subsequently fine-tuned on a comparatively small dataset tailored to a specific target robot. Such adaptation recipe is now widely established, achieving its most mature results on fixed-base arms due to their static base dynamics and consistent reference frame. Mounting the same arm on a quadruped extends the workspace to the entire floor, but fundamentally changes the embodiment: rather than controlling the arm in isolation, the policy must jointly coordinate base navigation, body posture, and end-effector motion. In this work, we study the practical demands of this embodiment change across data collection, model adaptation, and inference design to achieve closed-loop loco-manipulation on a Unitree Go2 with an AgileX Piper arm. We report the choices that made this real-robot deployment feasible, namely model variant, action horizon, and demonstration conventions, together with a study tailored to a pick-and-place task, separating data coverage from model capacity. We show that expanding demonstration coverage reduces held-out end-effector error by 30%, and incorporating secondary skills (such as pushing rather than grasping) introduces new behavioral modes without degrading baseline performance. Finally, closed-loop real-world experiments show how dataset composition shapes success and failure, validating the pipeline for more complex loco-manipulation.

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Giovanni Minelli, Antonio Langella, Giovanni B. Dessy, Lorenzo Amatucci, Giulio Turrisi, Victor Barasuol, Claudio Semini. 2026-10-23. From Tabletop to Walking Bot: Deploying a VLA Model on a Legged Manipulator Robot. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.32271

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