# A Collision-Free MPC for Whole-Body Dynamic Locomotion and Manipulation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.12385 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.12385/

## Key facts

- Cited by 17 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 24 Feb 2022.

## Built on by (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Agile But Safe: Learning Collision-Free High-Speed Legged Locomotion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.17583/) (2024)
- [M2Diffuser: Diffusion-based Trajectory Optimization for Mobile Manipulation in 3D Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11402/) (2024)
- [Learning coordinated badminton skills for legged manipulators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22974/) (2025)
- [Learning to Open and Traverse Doors with a Legged Manipulator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.04882/) (2024)
- [Robotic Table Wiping via Reinforcement Learning and Whole-body Trajectory Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10865/) (2022)
- [One Filter to Deploy Them All: Robust Safety for Quadrupedal Navigation in Unknown Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09989/) (2024)
- [Whole-body End-Effector Pose Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.16048/) (2024)
- [FALCON: Actively Decoupled Visuomotor Policies for Loco-Manipulation with Foundation-Model-Based Coordination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.04381/) (2025)
- [PAC-MAN: Perception-Aware CBF-RL for Whole-Body Safety in Humanoid Dodgeball](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.28623/) (2026)
- [Toward Reliable Sim-to-Real Predictability for MoE-based Robust Quadrupedal Locomotion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.00678/) (2026)
- [QuadWBG: Generalizable Quadrupedal Whole-Body Grasping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.06782/) (2024)
- [A Reactive Framework for Whole-Body Motion Planning of Mobile Manipulators Combining Reinforcement Learning and SDF-Constrained Quadratic Programmi](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23975/) (2025)
- [Effective Virtual Reality Teleoperation of an Upper-body Humanoid with Modified Task Jacobians and Relaxed Barrier Functions for Self-Collision Avoidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.07534/) (2024)
- [CoFreeVLA: Short-Horizon Collision-Free Dual-Arm Manipulation via Vision-Language-Action Model and Risk Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.21712/) (2026)
- [Whole-Body Mobile Manipulation using Offline Reinforcement Learning on Sub-optimal Controllers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.12509/) (2026)
- [Learning Dynamic Pick-and-Place for a Legged Manipulator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.15713/) (2026)
- [SafeExplorer: An Unbiased Policy Gradient for Reinforcement Learning with Recovery Interventions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.08925/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we present a real-time whole-body planner for collision-free legged mobile manipulation. We enforce both self-collision and environment-collision avoidance as soft constraints within a Model Predictive Control (MPC) scheme that solves a multi-contact optimal control problem. By penalizing the signed distances among a set of representative primitive collision bodies, the robot is able to safely execute a variety of dynamic maneuvers while preventing any self-collisions. Moreover, collision-free navigation and manipulation in both static and dynamic environments are made viable through efficient queries of distances and their gradients via a euclidean signed distance field. We demonstrate through a comparative study that our approach only slightly increases the computational complexity of the MPC planning. Finally, we validate the effectiveness of our framework through a set of hardware experiments involving dynamic mobile manipulation tasks with potential collisions, such as locomotion balancing with the swinging arm, weight throwing, and autonomous door opening.