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:2603. 13707v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Humanoid loco-manipulation requires coordinated task-space motion planning with stable loco-manipulation command tracking under complex robot-environment dynamics and long-horizon tasks.
By Zhaoyuan Gu, Yipu Chen, Zimeng Chai, Alfred Cueva, Thong Nguyen, Yifan Wu, Huishu Xue, Minji Kim, Isaac Legene, Fukang Liu, KyoungMok Kim, Ayan Barula, Yongxin Chen, Ye Zhao
The paper presents a decentralized, object‑centric control strategy for cooperative multi‑humanoid pickup and transport of objects with diverse sizes, weights, and shapes. Each humanoid is assigned a local attachment region on the shared object and learns to perform gripperless bimanual pinching, enabling pickup, transport, and handover without task‑specific redesign. Experiments in simulation and on real hardware demonstrate that single‑robot trained policies transfer to multi‑robot settings and that additional multi‑robot training further improves coordination.
By Bikram Pandit, Mohitvishnu S. Gadde, Aayam Kumar Shrestha, Alan Fern
arXiv:2606. 11891v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-objective reinforcement learning for humanoid robots must coordinate locomotion and manipulation within a single policy.
By Mehmet Turan Yard{\i}mc{\i}
arXiv:2608. 07746v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-horizon humanoid loco-manipulation requires composing versatile whole-body skills and reliable high-level decision making.
By Cheng Guo, Mingzhe Ni, Angelo Cangelosi, Arash Ajoudani
arXiv:2608. 16837v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Humanoid robots hold great promise as general-purpose agents in human-centered environments, yet generalist vision-language-action (VLA) foundation models are not readily applicable to humanoid whole-body loco-manipulation.
By Langzhe Gu, Chengkai Hou, Meng Li, Xinhua Wang, Jiaming Liu, Xinyuan Lv, Bowei Zhang, Shuanghao Bai, Guangrun Li, Jingyang He, Gaole Dai, Ziluo Ding, Zhiyuan Xu, Kuan Cheng, Jian Tang, Zhengping Che, Shanghang Zhang
arXiv:2510. 08807v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: From loco-motion to dextrous manipulation, humanoid robots have made remarkable strides in demonstrating complex full-body capabilities.
By Zhenyu Zhao, Hongyi Jing, Xiawei Liu, Jiageng Mao, Abha Jha, Hanwen Yang, Rong Xue, Sergey Zakharov, Vitor Guizilini, Yue Wang
Humanoid robots hold great promise as general-purpose agents in human-centered environments, yet generalist vision-language-action (VLA) foundation models are not readily applicable to humanoid whole-body loco-manipulation. The high dimensionality and interdependence of humanoid motions make it challenging for conventional single-stage VLA architectures to coordinate locomotion, waist posture, and dual-arm manipulation effectively.
Humanoid loco-manipulation is often simplified into a stop-and-go process: walking to an object, stopping to manipulate it, and then resuming locomotion. It also commonly relies on low degree-of-freedom (DoF) end effectors that behave like an open-close grasp primitive.
arXiv:2607. 07370v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In embodied intelligence systems, the motion controller serves as the critical bridge between semantic reasoning and physical execution.
By Xufeng Zhao, Fuzhi Yang, Jianhui Chen, Li Gao, Zhang Meng, Jie Gao, Yao Zheng, Wenyu Liu, Menglin Yang, Minqi Gu, Yaru Zhao, Honglin Han, Shihui Su, Zixiao Tang, Liu Liu, Mu Xu, Yang Cai, Wenbin Tang
arXiv:2509. 26633v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A dominant paradigm for teaching humanoid robots complex skills is to retarget human motions as kinematic references to train reinforcement learning (RL) policies.
By Lujie Yang, Xiaoyu Huang, Zhen Wu, Angjoo Kanazawa, Pieter Abbeel, Carmelo Sferrazza, C. Karen Liu, Rocky Duan, Guanya Shi
arXiv:2511. 07820v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Despite the rise of billion-parameter foundation models trained across thousands of graphical processing units (GPUs), similar scaling gains have not been shown for humanoid control.
By Zhengyi Luo, Ye Yuan, Tingwu Wang, Chenran Li, Fernando Casta\~neda, Sirui Chen, Zi-Ang Cao, Jiefeng Li, David Minor, Qingwei Ben, Jinhyung Park, David Sami, Zi Wang, Xingye Da, Runyu Ding, Cyrus Hogg, Lina Song, Edy Lim, Eugene Jeong, Tairan He, Haoru Xue, Wenli Xiao, Simon Yuen, Jan Kautz, Yan Chang, Umar Iqbal, Linxi "Jim" Fan, Yuke Zhu