# Whole-Body Ergodic Exploration with a Manipulator Using Diffusion

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.16898 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16898/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 29 Jun 2023.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Volumetric Ergodic Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.11533/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper presents a whole-body robot control method for exploring and probing a given region of interest. The ergodic control formalism behind such an exploration behavior consists of matching the time-averaged statistics of a robot trajectory with the spatial statistics of the target distribution. Most existing ergodic control approaches assume the robots/sensors as individual point agents moving in space. We introduce an approach that decomposes the whole-body of a robotic manipulator into multiple kinematically constrained agents. Then, we generate control actions by calculating a consensus among the agents. To do so, we use an ergodic control formulation called heat equation-driven area coverage (HEDAC) and slow the diffusion using the non-stationary heat equation. Our approach extends HEDAC to applications where robots have multiple sensors on the whole-body (such as tactile skin) and use all sensors to optimally explore the given region. We show that our approach increases the exploration performance in terms of ergodicity and scales well to real-world problems. We compare our method in kinematic simulations with the state-of-the-art and demonstrate the applicability of an online exploration task with a 7-axis Franka Emika robot. Additional material available at https://sites.google.com/view/w-ee-d/