  Quadrupedal robots have emerged as versatile agents capable of locomoting and
manipulating in complex environments. Traditional designs typically rely on the
robot's inherent body parts or incorporate top-mounted arms for manipulation
tasks. However, these configurations may limit the robot's operational
dexterity, efficiency and adaptability, particularly in cluttered or
constrained spaces. In this work, we present LocoMan, a dexterous quadrupedal
robot with a novel morphology to perform versatile manipulation in diverse
constrained environments. By equipping a Unitree Go1 robot with two low-cost
and lightweight modular 3-DoF loco-manipulators on its front calves, LocoMan
leverages the combined mobility and functionality of the legs and grippers for
complex manipulation tasks that require precise 6D positioning of the end
effector in a wide workspace. To harness the loco-manipulation capabilities of
LocoMan, we introduce a unified control framework that extends the whole-body
controller (WBC) to integrate the dynamics of loco-manipulators. Through
experiments, we validate that the proposed whole-body controller can accurately
and stably follow desired 6D trajectories of the end effector and torso, which,
when combined with the large workspace from our design, facilitates a diverse
set of challenging dexterous loco-manipulation tasks in confined spaces, such
as opening doors, plugging into sockets, picking objects in narrow and
low-lying spaces, and bimanual manipulation.
