Humanoid Robot Control

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Overview

Humanoid robot control studies how robots coordinate balance, walking, and whole-body actions such as reaching, carrying, and recovering from pushes. Approaches include model-predictive and whole-body controllers grounded in robot dynamics, reinforcement learning and imitation from human motion, and newer perception- or language-conditioned policies. Researchers test these methods in simulation and on hardware across tasks such as terrain navigation, object handling, teleoperation, and sports. A central challenge is making controllers generalize to new motions, bodies, and contact conditions while remaining stable and safe outside simulation.

Latest papers

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206 papers45 papers in the last four weeks, up 45% on the four weeks before. 0.3% of all new papers.

  1. Humanoid Dodgeball: Learning Fast Dynamic Obstacle Avoidance Motions for Humanoids

    Oct 29, 2026Aoqian Zhang, Chunzheng Wang, Haoran Chen +4Dynamic Obstacle AvoidanceHumanoid Robot Control

    Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore. · Shenzhen EngineAI Robotics Technology Co., Ltd., China. · School of Information and Communication Engineering, Dalian University of Technology, China.

  2. SONIC-K1: Porting a Universal Humanoid Motion Tracker to a Small Humanoid on a Single GPU

    Oct 29, 2026Kyrylo Kolesnichenko, Jong-Hoon KimHumanoid Motion TrackingHumanoid Robot Control

    Kaunas Faculty, Vilnius University, Lithuania · Advanced Telerobotics Research Lab - Computer Science Department, Kent State University, Kent, OH 44242, USA

  3. METATRON: A Promptable Whole-Body Execution Layer for Humanoids

    Oct 27, 2026Chen Tessler, Yifeng Jiang, Alec Otto +4Humanoid Robot ControlRobot Motion Generation

    NVIDIA. · Dollhouse Robotics.

  4. FORGE: Feasible Online Reduced-Order Reference Generation and Whole-Body Execution for Agile Humanoid Locomotion

    Oct 27, 2026Adrian B. Ghansah, Yujin An, Jeeseop Kim +1Humanoid Robot LocomotionHumanoid Robot Control

    A. B. Ghansah, and S. J. Chung are with the Department of Control and Dynamical Systems, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA · Y. An is with the Department of Bioengineering, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA · J. Kim is with the Dept. of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, The University of Texas at El Paso, TX 79968, USA

  5. Whole-Body Humanoid Control via Stochastic Motion Tokenization

    Oct 27, 2026Michael Drolet, Oleg Arenz, Jan PetersHumanoid Robot ControlHumanoid Motion Tracking

    Technical University of Darmstadt · German Research Center for AI (DFKI) · Robotics Institute Germany (RIG)

  6. HoloBoxing: A Simple Recipe for Humanoid Boxing with 7 Minutes of Single-GPU Training

    Oct 23, 2026Xihan Ma, Bo Zhang, Boxiong Li +3Humanoid RoboticsHumanoid Robot Control

  7. Delay Randomization Widens the Delay Margin of Learned Humanoid Motion Trackers

    Oct 23, 2026Shaoqin Li, Yi SunHumanoid Robot ControlRobust Control

    Department of Electrical Engineering, The City College of New York, New York, NY 10031, USA

  8. Motion Retargeting with Spatiotemporal Preferences for Humanoid Loco-Manipulation

    Oct 21, 2026Xiongbo Shi, Shihang Du, Zongyou Yu +6Motion RetargetingHumanoid Robot Control

    Physical Intelligence Lab, Tongji University, Shanghai, China. · Shanghai Innovation Institute, Shanghai, China. · RobotScale.AI.

  9. Test-Time Motion Steering for Perceptive Humanoid Fall Recovery

    Oct 21, 2026Osher Azulay, Cheng-Lin Hsieh, Stella X. YuHumanoid Robot Fall RecoveryHumanoid Robot Control

    University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

  10. SP-HLM: Sparse-Pose-Driven Motion Generation and Whole-Body Control for Humanoid Loco-Manipulation

    Oct 21, 2026Zhaohui Yang, Quanbao Lin, Chengqi Shi +9Humanoid Loco-ManipulationHumanoid Robot Control

    Shanghai Jiao Tong University · The University of Hong Kong · Moore Threads

  11. HuMiT: Low-Latency Whole-Body Humanoid Teleoperation via Compact Reference Tracking

    Oct 21, 2026Liu Cao, Botian Xu, Ruoqu Chen +5Robot TeleoperationHumanoid Robot Control

    Tsinghua IIIS · The Chinese University of Hong Kong · Renmin University of China +2

  12. One Policy, Many Styles: Where to Aggregate Preferences for Steerable Humanoid Control?

    Oct 20, 2026Ziqian Huang, Yuzhuo Chen, Shimin Zhang +3Preference-Based RLHumanoid Robot Control

    College of Computing Georgia Institute of Technology

  13. SuperMimic: Scaling Humanoid Whole-Body Control with One Differentiable World Model

    Oct 20, 2026Qiayuan Liao, Yiyang Shao, Junfeng Long +4Humanoid Robot ControlHumanoid Motion Tracking

    UC Berkeley

  14. HAF-VLA: Hierarchical Action Flow Framework for Humanoid Vision-Language-Action Control

    Oct 19, 2026Langzhe Gu, Chengkai Hou, Meng Li +12Humanoid Robot ControlHumanoid Loco-Manipulation

    State Key Laboratory of Multimedia Information Processing, School of Computer Science, Peking University · Beijing Innovation Center of Humanoid Robotics · Nankai University +2

  15. OmniInteract: Towards Unified Whole-Body Interaction Control for Dual Humanoids

    Oct 19, 2026Yinghao Li, Tianyu Zhang, Zhuohao Li +4Humanoid Robot ControlHuman-Robot Collaboration

    School of Computer Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University · Shenzhen Loop Area Institute · Beijing Institute of Technology +1

  16. SWAP: Test-Time Steerable Humanoid Whole-Body Collision Avoidance

    Oct 19, 2026Zeji Yi, Guanqi He, Xiaofeng Guo +5Robot Collision AvoidanceHumanoid Robot Control

    Carnegie Mellon University · Amazon FAR

  17. Beyond Human-Derived Motion: Exploring Robot-Specific Execution for Construction Humanoids

    Oct 16, 2026MinJun Chang, Taehyung Kim, Yong K. Cho +1Humanoid Robot ControlRobot Motion Generation

    School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332, USA · Department of Mobility Systems Engineering, Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea

  18. BeJEPA: A Goal-Conditioned Humanoid Behavior World Model via Unsupervised RL

    Oct 16, 2026Liyun Yan, Haoyang Li, Yang Zhang +11Humanoid Robot ControlWorld Models for Robotics

    RL2 Lab, Shanghai Jiao Tong University · Shanghai Innovation Institute · Zhejiang University +3

  19. Inertially Significant Humanoid Teleoperation via Whole Body Model Predictive Control and Online Parameter Estimation

    Oct 15, 2026James Foster, Beomyeong Park, Luigi Penco +1Humanoid Robot ControlRobot Teleoperation

    Robotics Lab, Florida Institute for Human & Machine Cognition, USA · Intelligent Systems & Robotics, University of West Florida, USA

  20. Modeling and Understanding Neural Weights of Humanoid Policies with Diffusion

    Oct 14, 2026Huixuan Cheng, Bike Zhang, Shankar Sastry +1Generative ModelingHumanoid Robot Control

    The authors are with the University of California, Berkeley.

  21. PingpongDuo: Agile Humanoid Table Tennis Doubles with Safe Team Coordination

    Oct 14, 2026Haoran Jiang, Yichao Zhong, Kai Zhang +6Robotic Table TennisRobotics

    Shanghai Innovation Institute · Archon Robotics · The University of Hong Kong +1

  22. Eye, Robot: Learning Expressive Gaze Dynamics via a VLM-Guided Transformer-VAE

    Oct 14, 2026Yuhang Hu, Junlin Lyu, Yuan Fang +6Robot Motion GenerationHumanoid Robot Control

    Creative Machines Lab, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Columbia University

  23. Contact-UAN: Unsupervised Actuator Networks as a Residual World Model for Humanoid Control

    Oct 13, 2026Nolan Fey, Khai Nguyen, Yash Prabhu +2Humanoid Robot ControlHumanoid Robot Locomotion

    Improbable AI Lab, MIT

  24. TRACE: Efficient Transfer Learning for Neural Whole-Body Control Across Humanoid Embodiments

    Oct 13, 2026Qingyu Lan, Zhihao Tian, Zifan Wang +1Humanoid Robot ControlCross-Embodiment Robot Learning

    The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) · The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

  25. P-BFM: Perceptive Behavioral Foundation Models for Humanoid Control via Unsupervised Reinforcement Learning

    Oct 11, 2026Xue Wang, Yitang Li, Yiming Zhang +7Unsupervised RLBehavioral Foundation Models

    University of Shanghai for Science and Technology · RoboPartyLab · Tsinghua University +2

  26. Modeling and Control of a Rigid-soft Hybrid-link Humanoid Robot

    Oct 10, 2026Zewen He, Taiki Ishigaki, Ko YamamotoHumanoid Robot ControlRobotic Control

    Department of Mechano-informatics, The University of Tokyo, 7-3-1 Hongo Bunkyo-ku, 113-8656, Tokyo, Japan

  27. Scalable Multi-Human Cooperative Manipulation via Commander-Executor Coordination

    Oct 10, 2026Buzhen Huang, Xingchen Wu, Yuanwang Yang +2Multi-Agent CoordinationMulti-Agent Control

    Tianjin University

  28. B-Human '26 - Scalable Team Play up to 11 vs. 11

    Oct 10, 2026Arne Hasselbring, Tim Laue, Thomas Röfer +1RoboticsHumanoid Robotics

    Universität Bremen, Fachbereich 3 – Mathematik und Informatik, Postfach 330 440, 28334 Bremen, Germany · Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz, Cyber-Physical Systems, Enrique-Schmidt-Str. 5, 28359 Bremen, Germany

  29. Composable Dynamics for Cooperative Humanoids: A RoboCompiler Extension

    Oct 9, 2026Mehdi Heydari Shahna, Jouni MattilaMultibody DynamicsHumanoid Robot Control

    Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences, Tampere University, Tampere, Finland

  30. ATHLETE: Learning Reactive Humanoid Tennis via Trajectory-Guided Motion Matching

    Oct 9, 2026Zhihao Tian, Zifan Wang, Enzheng Zhu +4Robot Policy LearningHumanoid Robot Control

    The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), Guangzhou, China.