arXiv Machine Learning

HULK: Learning Whole-Body Forceful Loco-Manipulation for Humanoids

arXiv AI
Jul 20

Interaction-Aware Whole-Body Control for Compliant Object Transport

arXiv:2603. 03751v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Cooperative object transport in unstructured environments remains challenging for assistive humanoids because strong, time-varying interaction forces can make tracking-centric whole-body control unreliable, especially in close-contact support tasks.

By Hao Zhang, Yves Tseng, Ding Zhao, H. Eric Tseng
arXiv AI
Oct 16

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.

By Conor Mc Gartoll, An Dang, Pranay Thangeda, Arjun Gupta, Carolina Higuera, Nima Fazeli, Mustafa Mukadam, Manikantan Nambi
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
Aug 19

Lambda-Hold Control: Human-Like Movement Emerges from a Minimal Task Reward in Predictive Musculoskeletal Simulation

The paper introduces the λ-hold controller, a minimal-task-reward approach inspired by the equilibrium-point hypothesis, to train a muscle-actuated skeletal model for human-like sprinting. By fixing each muscle’s EP threshold length λ over gait-phase intervals, the controller dramatically reduces the action space and the frequency of policy queries, enabling efficient exploration and learning within an hour of training. This method demonstrates that physiologically grounded control can produce realistic human motion in predictive musculoskeletal simulations.

By Jun Hyuk Lee, Chihyeong Lee, Jooeun Ahn
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 31

REFINE-DP: Diffusion Policy Fine-tuning for Humanoid Loco-manipulation via Reinforcement Learning

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
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