cs.ROSep 28, 2026

HOI-Retarget: Contact-Centric Retargeting for Human-Object Interaction

Authors: Jihwan Shin, Adrià López Escoriza, Junzhe He, Matthias Heyrman, Marco Hutter

Organizations: Robotic Systems Lab, ETH Zürich, 8092 Zürich, Switzerland

Abstract

Learning from demonstration (LfD) has enabled humanoid robots to acquire diverse whole-body skills, but extending this paradigm to human-object interaction (HOI) is limited by the availability of robot-compatible interaction references. We present HOI-Retarget, a contact-centric retargeting method that transfers HOI onto a humanoid robot for large-scale motion-data generation. Its windowed trajectory optimization uses every labeled contact as a target in the object frame, balancing body tracking, foot support and smoothness under the robot's kinematic limits. The method can augment a single demonstration across object sizes, absorb contacts reconstructed from monocular video, and extend to several robots manipulating one object. We publicly release the code and the retargeted motion dataset.

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