# Harmonic Mobile Manipulation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.06639 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06639/

## Key facts

- Cited by 17 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 46 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Dec 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 46)

- [Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06347/) (2017)
- [RT-2: Vision-Language-Action Models Transfer Web Knowledge to Robotic Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15818/) (2023)
- [Do As I Can, Not As I Say: Grounding Language in Robotic Affordances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01691/) (2022)
- [RT-1: Robotics Transformer for Real-World Control at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06817/) (2022)
- [Meta-World: A Benchmark and Evaluation for Multi-Task and Meta Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10897/) (2019)
- [Habitat: A Platform for Embodied AI Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01201/) (2019)
- [Inner Monologue: Embodied Reasoning through Planning with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05608/) (2022)
- [Isaac Gym: High Performance GPU-Based Physics Simulation For Robot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10470/) (2021)
- [AI2-THOR: An Interactive 3D Environment for Visual AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.05474/) (2017)
- [Habitat 2.0: Training Home Assistants to Rearrange their Habitat](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14405/) (2021)
- [ProcTHOR: Large-Scale Embodied AI Using Procedural Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.06994/) (2022)
- [DD-PPO: Learning Near-Perfect PointGoal Navigators from 2.5 Billion Frames](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00357/) (2019)
- [ManiSkill2: A Unified Benchmark for Generalizable Manipulation Skills](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04659/) (2023)
- [Habitat 3.0: A Co-Habitat for Humans, Avatars and Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13724/) (2023)
- [MimicPlay: Long-Horizon Imitation Learning by Watching Human Play](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12422/) (2023)
- [TidyBot: Personalized Robot Assistance with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05658/) (2023)
- [ManiSkill: Generalizable Manipulation Skill Benchmark with Large-Scale Demonstrations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.14483/) (2021)
- [Large Language Models as General Pattern Machines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.04721/) (2023)
- [Simple but Effective: CLIP Embeddings for Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09888/) (2021)
- [Human-to-Robot Imitation in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09450/) (2022)
- [The Surprising Effectiveness of Representation Learning for Visual Imitation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01511/) (2021)
- [PDDLStream: Integrating Symbolic Planners and Blackbox Samplers via Optimistic Adaptive Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08705/) (2018)
- [RT-Trajectory: Robotic Task Generalization via Hindsight Trajectory Sketches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.01977/) (2023)
- [Deep Whole-Body Control: Learning a Unified Policy for Manipulation and Locomotion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10044/) (2022)
- [Habitat-Matterport 3D Semantics Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05633/) (2022)
- [Navigating to Objects in the Real World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00922/) (2022)
- [HomeRobot: Open-Vocabulary Mobile Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11565/) (2023)
- [ManipulaTHOR: A Framework for Visual Object Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11213/) (2021)
- [DexPoint: Generalizable Point Cloud Reinforcement Learning for Sim-to-Real Dexterous Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09423/) (2022)
- [The ThreeDWorld Transport Challenge: A Visually Guided Task-and-Motion Planning Benchmark for Physically Realistic Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14025/) (2021)

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

- [Mobile ALOHA: Learning Bimanual Mobile Manipulation with Low-Cost Whole-Body Teleoperation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02117/) (2024)
- [Visual Whole-Body Control for Legged Loco-Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16967/) (2024)
- [MoManipVLA: Transferring Vision-language-action Models for General Mobile Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13446/) (2025)
- [Adaptive Mobile Manipulation for Articulated Objects In the Open World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14403/) (2024)
- [BEHAVIOR Robot Suite: Streamlining Real-World Whole-Body Manipulation for Everyday Household Activities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.05652/) (2025)
- [AC-DiT: Adaptive Coordination Diffusion Transformer for Mobile Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.01961/) (2025)
- [Continuously Improving Mobile Manipulation with Autonomous Real-World RL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.20568/) (2024)
- [TidyBot++: An Open-Source Holonomic Mobile Manipulator for Robot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10447/) (2024)
- [Versatile Loco-Manipulation through Flexible Interlimb Coordination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07876/) (2025)
- [Learning Panorama-Aware VLA for Mobile Manipulation with Whole-Body Teleoperation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.02257/) (2026)
- [Embodied AI with Foundation Models for Mobile Service Robots: A Systematic Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20503/) (2025)
- [Opening Articulated Structures in the Real World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17767/) (2024)
- [YOR: Your Own Mobile Manipulator for Generalizable Robotics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.11150/) (2026)
- [MoPA: Coordinated Mobile Manipulation via Subsystem-Specific Perception Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.12081/) (2026)
- [EgoActor: Grounding Task Planning into Spatial-aware Egocentric Actions for Humanoid Robots via Visual-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.04515/) (2026)
- [Whole-Body Mobile Manipulation using Offline Reinforcement Learning on Sub-optimal Controllers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.12509/) (2026)
- [SEVO: Semantic-Enhanced Virtual Observation for Robust VLA Manipulation via Active Illumination and Data-Centric Collection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.11114/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advancements in robotics have enabled robots to navigate complex scenes or manipulate diverse objects independently. However, robots are still impotent in many household tasks requiring coordinated behaviors such as opening doors. The factorization of navigation and manipulation, while effective for some tasks, fails in scenarios requiring coordinated actions. To address this challenge, we introduce, HarmonicMM, an end-to-end learning method that optimizes both navigation and manipulation, showing notable improvement over existing techniques in everyday tasks. This approach is validated in simulated and real-world environments and adapts to novel unseen settings without additional tuning. Our contributions include a new benchmark for mobile manipulation and the successful deployment with only RGB visual observation in a real unseen apartment, demonstrating the potential for practical indoor robot deployment in daily life. More results are on our project site: https://rchalyang.github.io/HarmonicMM/