HOMIE: Humanoid Loco-Manipulation with Isomorphic Exoskeleton Cockpit

Current humanoid teleoperation systems either lack reliable low-level control policies, or struggle to acquire accurate whole-body control commands, making it difficult to teleoperate humanoids for loco-manipulation tasks. To solve these issues, we propose HOMIE, a novel humanoid teleoperation cockpit integrates a humanoid loco-manipulation policy and a low-cost exoskeleton-based hardware system. The policy enables humanoid robots to walk and squat to specific heights while accommodating arbitrary upper-body poses. This is achieved through our novel reinforcement learning-based training framework that incorporates upper-body pose curriculum, height-tracking reward, and symmetry utilization, without relying on any motion priors. Complementing the policy, the hardware system integrates isomorphic exoskeleton arms, a pair of motion-sensing gloves, and a pedal, allowing a single operator to achieve full control of the humanoid robot. Our experiments show our cockpit facilitates more stable, rapid, and precise humanoid loco-manipulation teleoperation, accelerating task completion and eliminating retargeting errors compared to inverse kinematics-based methods. We also validate the effectiveness of the data collected by our cockpit for imitation learning. Our project is fully open-sourced, demos and code can be found in https://homietele.github.io/.