Organizations: Institute of Artificial Intelligence (TeleAI), China Telecom · Zhejiang University · University of Science and Technology of China · ShanghaiTech University
Executing reliable Humanoid-Object Interaction (HOI) tasks for humanoid robots is hindered by the lack of generalized control interfaces and robust closed-loop perception mechanisms. In this work, we introduce Perceptive Root-guided Humanoid-Object Interaction, Pro-HOI, a generalizable framework for robust humanoid loco-manipulation. First, we collect box-carrying motions that are suitable for real-world deployment and optimize penetration artifacts through a Signed Distance Field loss. Second, we propose a novel training framework that conditions the policy on a desired root-trajectory while utilizing reference motion exclusively as a reward. This design not only eliminates the need for intricate reward tuning but also establishes root trajectory as a universal interface for high-level planners, enabling simultaneous navigation and loco-manipulation. Furthermore, to ensure operational reliability, we incorporate a persistent object estimation module. By fusing real-time detection with Digital Twin, this module allows the robot to autonomously detect slippage and trigger re-grasping maneuvers. Empirical validation on a Unitree G1 robot demonstrates that Pro-HOI significantly outperforms baselines in generalization and robustness, achieving reliable long-horizon execution in complex real-world scenarios.
Figures & tables
Method
No External Devices
Whole-Body Control
Generalizable Interaction
Controlable
Failure Recovery
OmniRetarget [ 43 ]
✓
✓
×
×
×
HDMI [ 37 ]
×
✓
×
×
×
DemoHLM
✓
✓
✓
×
×
PhysHSI [ 34 ]
✓
✓
✓
×
×
Falcon [ 47 ]
✓
✓
✓
✓
×
OURS
✓
✓
✓
✓
✓
TABLE I: Capability comparison across different methods
Fig. 2: Overview of Pro-HOI. a) Data Preparation : We frist collect human motion clips using the mocap system, and augment them with object geometries in Blender . Then we use SDF-based optimization to generate physically feasible reference motions. b) Root-Guided Policy Learning : The RL policy is trained to perform whole-body interaction skills conditioned on the desired root trajectory, while utilizing the reference motion as rewards. c) Real-world Deployment : We integrate FoundationPose for 6D object pose estimation and FAST-LIO2 [ 42 ] for root pose estimation, combined with the Interaction Pose Prior and a task specific planner to generate target root trajectories. The full stack executes entirely onboard a Jetson NX with a D435i camera and a Mid-360 LiDAR, achieving robust sim-to-real transfer.
Method
In Distribution
Out Distribution
R succ (% ↑ )
R prec (cm ↓ )
R task (% ↑ )
V exec (m/s ↑ )
R succ (% ↑ )
R prec (cm ↓ )
R task (% ↑ )
V exec (m/s ↑ )
w/o SDF
97.90
7.54
55.76
0.29
82.52
8.44
64.26
0.436
w/o contact
94.99
7.86
31.13
0.29
88.43
8.28
71.65
0.41
PhysHSI [ 34 ]
96.60
7.62
90.59
0.49
82.54
7.25
70.17
0.72
Ours
97.90
6.32
73.07
0.29
91.90
6.83
76.15
0.42
Ours w/ FR.
100.00
5.80
73.67
0.29
99.93
6.84
88.38
0.27
TABLE II: Quantitative comparison of success rates, placement precision and execution velocity in Mujoco.
Figure 4
Method
RPE ↓
ROE ↓
MPL ↓
CPL ↓
w/o Contact
0.23 ±0.03
6.39 ±0.53
18.37 ±1.54
20.50 ±7.00
w/o SDF
0.26 ±0.03
6.33 ±0.79
22.11 ±1.35
14.25 ±3.28
Ours
0.22 ±0.02
5.77 ±0.41
16.21 ±1.61
14.80 ±3.89
TABLE III: Quantitative comparison of tracking fidelity and synchronization. Metrics are reported as Mean ± Std . RPE : Root Position Error (m), ROE : Root Orientation Error (rad), MPL : Motion Phase Lag (s), CPL : Contact Phase Lag (s). The best results are highlighted in bold .
Profile
Command Velocity
GSR ( ↑ )
PP (m) ( ↓ )
v (m/s)
ω (rad/s)
Slow
0.2
0.6
7 / 10
0.15
Middle
0.4
1.0
21 / 28
0.16
Fast
0.6
1.3
6 / 10
0.25
TABLE IV: Real-world performance under different dynamic command profiles. GSR : Grasp Success Rate (%), PP : Placement Precision (error in m). The velocities represent the maximum commanded linear ( v ) and angular ( ω ) limits.
Fig. 5: The percentages quantify the likelihood of successfully detecting an object dropped within each respective region. (a) The detection probability distribution simulated via the object estimate module. (b) The baseline detection probability distribution relying exclusively on the onboard camera.
Fig. 6: The example of trajectory generation with contact information and simulated tracking contact.
Table 9
State term
Actor Dim
Critic Dim
Global root position
3
3
Global root orientation
6
6
Relative object position
3
3
Relative object orientation
6
6
Contact information
1
1
Root projected gravity
3
3
TABLE VII: Actor and critic observation state space.
Humanoid-Object Interaction (HOI) is a fundamental capability for humanoid robots, yet it remains challenging due to the tight coupling between dynamic balance and stable interaction with diverse objects. Existing methods often require time-consuming task-specific policy training or rely on rigid trajectory replay, which limits their ability to accommodate novel interaction scenarios. In this work, we present GenHOI, a simple yet effective framework that enables humanoid robots to perform diverse object-interaction tasks in a zero-shot manner by directly imitating a single generated video, without task-specific training or physical demonstration data. GenHOI first reconstructs the robot-object scene in simulation and renders a first-frame image, which, together with the language command, conditions the synthesis of a task-oriented interaction video. The generated video is then analyzed to identify interaction-relevant contact events and estimate hand-object contact regions, which are encoded as object-centric geometric constraints that convert visual interaction cues into physically grounded optimization priors. Guided by these priors, the reference motion recovered from the video is refined and smoothed to resolve the scale ambiguity inherent in 2D video generation, while adapting a single reference trajectory to unseen robot-object relative poses. The optimized trajectory is finally executed by a closed-loop tracking controller. We validate the proposed framework in extensive simulation and real-world experiments across diverse object-interaction tasks, including box grasping, asymmetric bimanual chair carrying, table lifting from below, and cylindrical-object enveloping.
Zhihai Bi, Qiang Zhang, Guoyang Zhao +8
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) · Artificial General Intelligence Institute, University of Science and Technology of China · The University of Hong Kong +1
Interaction is one of the core abilities of humanoid robots. However, most existing frameworks focus on non-interactive whole-body control, which limits their practical applicability. In this work, we develop InterReal, a unified physics-based imitation learning framework for Real-world human-object Interaction (HOI) control. InterReal enables humanoid robots to track HOI reference motions, facilitating the learning of fine-grained interactive skills and their deployment in real-world settings. Within this framework, we first introduce a HOI motion data augmentation scheme with hand-object contact constraints, and utilize the augmented motions to improve policy stability under object perturbations. Second, we propose an automatic reward learner to address the challenge of large-scale reward shaping. A meta-policy guided by critical tracking error metrics explores and allocates reward signals to the low-level reinforcement learning objective, which enables more effective learning of interactive policies. Experiments on HOI tasks of box-picking and box-pushing demonstrate that InterReal achieves the best tracking accuracy and the highest task success rate compared to recent baselines. Furthermore, we validate the framework on the real-world robot Unitree G1, which demonstrates its practical effectiveness and robustness beyond simulation.
Dayang Liang, Yuhang Lin, Xinzhe Liu +3
Xiamen University · Zhejiang University · ShanghaiTech University +1
Humanoid loco-manipulation requires adaptive whole-body coordination to seamlessly integrate locomotion and physical interaction. Despite recent advances, learning autonomous loco-manipulation remains challenging due to the scarcity of diverse, physically executable robot-object interaction data and the difficulty of learning unified whole-body control directly from onboard observations. We present ViLoMan, a scalable framework for autonomous humanoid loco-manipulation. ViLoMan first transforms partial kinematic demonstrations of human-object interactions into complete, physically executable robot trajectories. It then leverages these trajectories within a teacher-student distillation framework to learn a unified policy that maps egocentric depth observations and proprioceptive measurements directly to joint-level whole-body actions. During deployment, the policy requires neither reference motions nor intermediate commands. We evaluate ViLoMan on door-closing tasks across diverse door configurations and robot initial conditions in both simulation and the real world. Experimental results demonstrate that a single policy enables a Unitree G1 humanoid to complete the full task using only onboard depth sensing and proprioception, while generalizing robustly across task variations and transferring effectively from simulation to reality. Project page: viloman-anonymous.pages.dev.
Zejie Tian, Ruibing Hou, Bingpeng Ma +2
State Key Laboratory of AI Safety, Institute of Computing Technology, CAS, China.