ThinkLocoManip: A Whole-Body Control Agentic Harness for Legged Loco-Manipulation

Overview & Synopsis

In this paper, we propose ThinkLocoManip, an agentic harness for legged loco-manipulation designed to tackle complex, long-horizon tasks in large-scale environments. Existing approaches typically follow either direct action generation or a plan-then-act paradigm, both of which can struggle with the generalization and error-recovery capabilities required for extended task execution. In contrast, ThinkLocoManip adopts an interleaved reasoning-and-acting paradigm, allowing the agent to continuously reason about its current state, execute actions, observe their outcomes, and adapt its strategy accordingly. Building on this paradigm, our agentic harness orchestrates a suite of specialized tools for perception, navigation, manipulation, and locomotion, enabling flexible composition of heterogeneous capabilities. Unlike existing robotic agentic harnesses, ThinkLocoManip explicitly incorporates locomotion as a tool domain for agent reasoning and execution. We further design a set of skills that explicitly account for both tool usage within each functional domain and coordination across domains, supporting effective execution of complex behaviors over long horizons. To tackle task failure during long-horizon interactions, we develop keyframe thinking mechanism to preserve critical execution context and support efficient error recovery. Extensive real-world experiments demonstrate that ThinkLocoManip substantially outperforms representative methods based on both direct action generation and plan-then-act paradigms across challenging long-horizon legged loco-manipulation tasks. Notably, ThinkLocoManip achieves a success rate of 77%, more than twice that of the strongest plan-then-act baseline (37.1%). Our experiments further validate the effectiveness of interleaved reasoning and acting, tool orchestration, and coordinated skill execution.