Thor: Towards Human-Level Whole-Body Reactions for Intense Contact-Rich Environments

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Li, Gangyang, Shi, Qing, Hu, Youhao, Hu, Jincheng, Wang, Zhongyuan, Wang, Xinlong, Luo, Shaqi
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Li, Gangyang
Shi, Qing
Hu, Youhao
Hu, Jincheng
Wang, Zhongyuan
Wang, Xinlong
Luo, Shaqi
author_facet Li, Gangyang
Shi, Qing
Hu, Youhao
Hu, Jincheng
Wang, Zhongyuan
Wang, Xinlong
Luo, Shaqi
contents Humanoids hold great potential for service, industrial, and rescue applications, in which robots must sustain whole-body stability while performing intense, contact-rich interactions with the environment. However, enabling humanoids to generate human-like, adaptive responses under such conditions remains a major challenge. To address this, we propose Thor, a humanoid framework for human-level whole-body reactions in contact-rich environments. Based on the robot's force analysis, we design a force-adaptive torso-tilt (FAT2) reward function to encourage humanoids to exhibit human-like responses during force-interaction tasks. To mitigate the high-dimensional challenges of humanoid control, Thor introduces a reinforcement learning architecture that decouples the upper body, waist, and lower body. Each component shares global observations of the whole body and jointly updates its parameters. Finally, we deploy Thor on the Unitree G1, and it substantially outperforms baselines in force-interaction tasks. Specifically, the robot achieves a peak pulling force of 167.7 N (approximately 48% of the G1's body weight) when moving backward and 145.5 N when moving forward, representing improvements of 68.9% and 74.7%, respectively, compared with the best-performing baseline. Moreover, Thor is capable of pulling a loaded rack (130 N) and opening a fire door with one hand (60 N). These results highlight Thor's effectiveness in enhancing humanoid force-interaction capabilities.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_26280
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Thor: Towards Human-Level Whole-Body Reactions for Intense Contact-Rich Environments
Li, Gangyang
Shi, Qing
Hu, Youhao
Hu, Jincheng
Wang, Zhongyuan
Wang, Xinlong
Luo, Shaqi
Robotics
Humanoids hold great potential for service, industrial, and rescue applications, in which robots must sustain whole-body stability while performing intense, contact-rich interactions with the environment. However, enabling humanoids to generate human-like, adaptive responses under such conditions remains a major challenge. To address this, we propose Thor, a humanoid framework for human-level whole-body reactions in contact-rich environments. Based on the robot's force analysis, we design a force-adaptive torso-tilt (FAT2) reward function to encourage humanoids to exhibit human-like responses during force-interaction tasks. To mitigate the high-dimensional challenges of humanoid control, Thor introduces a reinforcement learning architecture that decouples the upper body, waist, and lower body. Each component shares global observations of the whole body and jointly updates its parameters. Finally, we deploy Thor on the Unitree G1, and it substantially outperforms baselines in force-interaction tasks. Specifically, the robot achieves a peak pulling force of 167.7 N (approximately 48% of the G1's body weight) when moving backward and 145.5 N when moving forward, representing improvements of 68.9% and 74.7%, respectively, compared with the best-performing baseline. Moreover, Thor is capable of pulling a loaded rack (130 N) and opening a fire door with one hand (60 N). These results highlight Thor's effectiveness in enhancing humanoid force-interaction capabilities.
title Thor: Towards Human-Level Whole-Body Reactions for Intense Contact-Rich Environments
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.26280