Stereo Multistage Spatial Attention for Real-Time Mobile Manipulation Under Visual Scale Variation and Disturbances

Original Abstract

Robots operating in open, unstructured real-world environments must rely on onboard visual perception while autonomously moving across different locations. Continuous changes in onboard camera viewpoints cause significant visual scale variations in target objects, affecting vision-based motion generation. In this work, we present a stereo multistage spatial attention-based deep predictive learning method for real-time mobile manipulation. The proposed methods extracts task-relevant spatial attention points from stereo images and integrates them with robot states through a hierarchical recurrent architecture for closed-loop action prediction. We evaluate the system on four real-world mobile manipulation tasks using a mobile manipulator, including rigid placement, articulated object manipulation, and deformable object interaction. Experiments under randomized initial positions and visual disturbance conditions demonstrate improved robustness and task success rates compared to representative imitation learning and vision-language-action baselines under identical control settings. The results indicate that structured stereo spatial attention combined with predictive temporal modeling provides an effective solution within the evaluated mobile manipulation scenarios.