SOMA: Stack-of-Objects Manipulation using a Quadruped Robot

Stergios E. Bachoumas, Panagiotis Artemiadis

Executing heavy-duty physical manipulation in unpredictable environments remains a major challenge for quadrupedal robots lacking dedicated manipulators. This paper presents SOMA, a hierarchical reinforcement learning framework for whole-body non-prehensile manipulation of multi-object stacks using a quadruped robot. Unlike traditional methods restricted to two-dimensional planar pushing, SOMA integrates explicit robot base-height control, unlocking full three-dimensional pushing strategies. This capability enables the quadruped to manipulate complex payload stacks as a unified system while preventing relative sliding or tipping of upper layers. The architecture factorizes control into a high-level manipulation policy using a Simplified Structured State Space Sequence (S5) encoder to reason over long-horizon temporal history and predict bounded target tracking commands via Beta distributions, and a low-level locomotion policy that dynamically adapts leg stance configurations. In extensive simulation benchmarks, SOMA achieves a $90.3\%$ success rate for single-object reposing and up to $90.1\%$ for dynamic two-box stacks under stringent error margins ($0.05\text{ m}$ position…