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HOVER: Versatile Neural Whole-Body Controller for Humanoid Robots

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arxiv 2410.21229 v2 pith:QZA73J7M submitted 2024-10-28 cs.RO

classification cs.RO
keywords controlhumanoidmodeshoverpolicywhole-bodyacrosscontroller
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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Humanoid whole-body control requires adapting to diverse tasks such as navigation, loco-manipulation, and tabletop manipulation, each demanding a different mode of control. For example, navigation relies on root velocity tracking, while tabletop manipulation prioritizes upper-body joint angle tracking. Existing approaches typically train individual policies tailored to a specific command space, limiting their transferability across modes. We present the key insight that full-body kinematic motion imitation can serve as a common abstraction for all these tasks and provide general-purpose motor skills for learning multiple modes of whole-body control. Building on this, we propose HOVER (Humanoid Versatile Controller), a multi-mode policy distillation framework that consolidates diverse control modes into a unified policy. HOVER enables seamless transitions between control modes while preserving the distinct advantages of each, offering a robust and scalable solution for humanoid control across a wide range of modes. By eliminating the need for policy retraining for each control mode, our approach improves efficiency and flexibility for future humanoid applications.

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Cited by 13 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. Weights or Skills? A Survey of Robot-Learning Techniques: from Action-Predicting Weights to Robots that Write their Own Skills

    cs.RO 2026-08 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A taxonomy of robot learning on a weights-versus-skills axis, with a five-rung self-improvement ladder whose top cell (feedback plus memory plus search) holds only a few recent systems.

  2. ContactMimic: Humanoid Object Interaction via Contact Control

    cs.RO 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A humanoid tracking policy is trained with contact-following rewards and trajectory augmentation to decouple physical contact from keypoint geometry, enabling runtime contact control.

  3. Kinodynamic Motion Retargeting for Humanoid Locomotion via Multi-Contact Whole-Body Trajectory Optimization

    cs.RO 2026-03 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A physics-aware motion-retargeting pipeline that uses ground-reaction-force-derived heel-toe contacts produces dynamically feasible humanoid references and improves downstream imitation learning.

  4. Look, Focus, Act: Efficient and Robust Robot Learning via Human Gaze and Foveated Vision Transformers

    cs.RO 2025-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Gaze-guided foveated patch tokenization reduces ViT tokens by 94%, accelerates training 7x and inference 3x, and improves robustness to distractors in bimanual manipulation policies.

  5. GMT: General Motion Tracking for Humanoid Whole-Body Control

    cs.RO 2025-06 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    GMT trains a single unified humanoid policy using adaptive sampling and mixture-of-experts, achieving lower tracking errors than a re-implemented ExBody2 across diverse whole-body motions.

  6. From Experts to a Generalist: Toward General Whole-Body Control for Humanoid Robots

    cs.RO 2025-06 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    BumbleBee, an expert-to-generalist pipeline using autoencoder-based motion clustering and per-cluster delta action models, reports state-of-the-art whole-body control on a Unitree G1 humanoid, with success rates of 89...

  7. SkillBlender: Towards Versatile Humanoid Whole-Body Loco-Manipulation via Skill Blending

    cs.RO 2025-06 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    SkillBlender pretrains reusable goal-conditioned skills and blends them with softmax per-joint weights to solve simulated humanoid loco-manipulation tasks with one or two reward terms.

  8. Hold My Beer: Learning Gentle Humanoid Locomotion and End-Effector Stabilization Control

    cs.RO 2025-05 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A slow-fast two-agent reinforcement learning architecture with separate upper- and lower-body policies reduces end-effector shaking during humanoid locomotion.

  9. Tired Actor: Fatigue-Informed Character Control

    cs.RO 2026-08 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    Injecting a muscle-fatigue model into a general physics-based character controller preserves motion imitation accuracy while producing tired, more human-like behaviors such as shorter steps, corner cutting, and fall c...

  10. Multi-Loco: Unifying Multi-Embodiment Legged Locomotion via Reinforcement Learning Augmented Diffusion

    cs.RO 2025-06 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    A single diffusion-plus-residual-RL policy, trained on four robot morphologies using zero-padded observations and actions, outperforms per-robot PPO baselines in simulation and transfers to real robots.

  11. Critic Architecture Matters: Dual vs. Unified Critics for Humanoid Loco-Manipulation

    cs.RO 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 4.0 of 10

    In a confounded single-seed comparison, a dual-critic design reached targets 3.5x faster than a unified critic, but the causal role of critic architecture was not isolated.

  12. From Motion to Behavior: Hierarchical Modeling of Humanoid Generative Behavior Control

    cs.RO 2025-05 reject novelty 4.0 of 10

    A new 124K-clip dataset with hierarchical text annotations, plus a pipeline that couples an LLM planner, a text-to-pose VAE, diffusion in-betweening, and physics control to generate long-horizon human behaviors.

  13. RSL-RL: A Learning Library for Robotics Research

    cs.RO 2025-09 conditional novelty 3.0 of 10

    RSL-RL is a compact, GPU-accelerated open-source RL library for robotics, providing PPO, DAgger-style behavior cloning, and auxiliary techniques in an easily modifiable codebase.

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