arXiv AI

Whole-Body Dexterity

Whole-Body Dexterity (WBD) is a framework that enables robots to use their entire body and appendages as contact surfaces for grasping and manipulating objects. The approach generates a dataset of feasible whole-body grasps, trains reinforcement‑learning experts on a repositioning objective, and distills them into a single policy that relies on proprioception and object geometry. The distilled policy achieves zero‑shot transfer to a real Unitree G1 robot, successfully completing complex tasks such as stowing a box under one arm and moving it from a shelf to a table, with a 90% success rate in real‑world trials.

arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 21

ULTRA: Unified Multimodal Control for Autonomous Humanoid Whole-Body Loco-Manipulation

ULTRA is a unified framework for autonomous humanoid whole-body locomotion and manipulation that overcomes limitations of prior methods by combining a physics-driven neural retargeting algorithm with a multimodal controller. The retargeting algorithm translates large-scale motion capture data into physically plausible humanoid motions, while the controller learns to handle both dense motion references and sparse task specifications using a range of sensory inputs, from accurate motion-capture states to noisy egocentric vision. In simulation and on a real Unitree G1 humanoid, ULTRA demonstrates improved generalization and robustness, enabling coordinated whole-body behavior from sparse intent without relying on test-time reference motions.

By Xialin He, Sirui Xu, Xinyao Li, Runpei Dong, Liuyu Bian, Yu-Xiong Wang, Liang-Yan Gui
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 9

VioLA: Learning Generalist Humanoid Control Policies from Human Data

VioLA is a generalist humanoid control policy that predicts body and hand motion latents instead of joint commands, enabling a pretrained controller to execute these latents on a robot. By aligning human and robot motion in shared latent spaces, the policy can be trained on a large dataset of 140.6 million frames, 93.2% of which are human demonstrations. As a result, VioLA can follow locomotion and manipulation instructions on a real robot zero‑shot, achieving 100% locomotion success and 88.6% manipulation success without task‑specific fine‑tuning.

By Mert Albaba, Jens Bei{\ss}wenger, Anna Manasyan, Daniel Marta, Michael J. Black, Wieland Brendel, Andreas Krause, Georg Martius, Martin Riedmiller