Humanoid robots are envisioned as embodied intelligent agents capable of performing a wide range of human-level loco-manipulation tasks, particularly in scenarios requiring strenuous and repetitive labor. However, learning these skills is challenging due to the high degrees of freedom of humanoid robots, and collecting sufficient training data for humanoid is a laborious process. Given the rapid introduction of new humanoid platforms, a cross-embodiment framework that allows generalizable skill transfer is becoming increasingly critical. To address this, we propose a transferable framework that reduces the data bottleneck by using a unified digital human model as a common prototype and bypassing the need for re-training on every new robot platform. The model learns behavior primitives from human demonstrations through adversarial imitation, and the complex robot structures are decomposed into functional components, each trained independently and dynamically coordinated. Task generalization is achieved through a human-object interaction graph, and skills are transferred to different robots via embodiment-specific kinematic motion retargeting and dynamic fine-tuning. Our framework is validated on five humanoid robots with diverse configurations, demonstrating stable loco-manipulation and highlighting its effectiveness in reducing data requirements and increasing the efficiency of skill transfer across platforms.

A new study found that all of these kinds of motion are well represented by a single mathematical model. "This didn't come out of nowhere -- this is from our real robot data," said Dan Zhao, first author of the study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and a recent Ph.D. graduate in mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan. "Even when the robot looks like it's sliding, like its feet are slipping, its velocity is still proportional to how quickly it's moving its body." Unlike the dynamic motion of gliding birds and sharks and galloping horses -- where speed is driven, at least in part, by momentum -- every bit of speed for ants, centipedes, snakes and swimming microbes is driven by changing the shape of the body. This is known as kinematic motion.