PanoVine: Whole-Body Visuomotor Control for Soft Growing Vine Robot

Vine robots, a class of soft, growing robots, are suitable for navigating complex and confined environments due to their compliant bodies and self-supporting growth mechanism. However, hysteresis, tether interactions, and deformations make them difficult to predict and model, which in turn limits the effectiveness of conventional planning and control approaches. In this work, we present a data-driven, vision-based control framework for the first autonomous vine robot system. Our system integrates 19 cameras distributed along the robot's body to provide comprehensive feedback of both the robot state and the surrounding environment. Using this rich whole-body vision feedback, we train an end-to-end visuomotor policy from demonstrations for closed-loop autonomous control in complex environments. The policy efficiently aggregates information from distributed sensing while maintaining robustness to inaccurate robot states and actuation. Experimental results demonstrate that the learned policy enables robust navigation and manipulation in challenging scenarios, including steering through branched structures, climbing up slopes, traversing unsupported terrain, reaching objects precisely, and maneuvering through confined spaces and obstacles. Project website https://panovine-bot.github.io