HULK: Learning Whole-Body Forceful Loco-Manipulation for Humanoids
Read the original on arXiv Machine Learning →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Machine Learning.
The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Machine Learning.
Humanoid loco-manipulation of large, heavy objects demands forceful interaction across the entire body. However, such payloads shift a humanoid's center of mass and impose sustained loads across the u...
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.
arXiv:2610.04238v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Humanoid robots could transport payloads substantially heavier than themselves by pulling passive wheeled vehicles instead of carrying the lo...
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.
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.
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.