ULTRA: Unified Multimodal Control for Autonomous Humanoid Whole-Body Loco-Manipulation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: He, Xialin, Xu, Sirui, Li, Xinyao, Dong, Runpei, Bian, Liuyu, Wang, Yu-Xiong, Gui, Liang-Yan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author He, Xialin
Xu, Sirui
Li, Xinyao
Dong, Runpei
Bian, Liuyu
Wang, Yu-Xiong
Gui, Liang-Yan
author_facet He, Xialin
Xu, Sirui
Li, Xinyao
Dong, Runpei
Bian, Liuyu
Wang, Yu-Xiong
Gui, Liang-Yan
contents Achieving autonomous and versatile whole-body loco-manipulation remains a central barrier to making humanoids practically useful. Yet existing approaches are fundamentally constrained: retargeted data are often scarce or low-quality; methods struggle to scale to large skill repertoires; and, most importantly, they rely on tracking predefined motion references rather than generating behavior from perception and high-level task specifications. To address these limitations, we propose ULTRA, a unified framework with two key components. First, we introduce a physics-driven neural retargeting algorithm that translates large-scale motion capture to humanoid embodiments while preserving physical plausibility for contact-rich interactions. Second, we learn a unified multimodal controller that supports both dense references and sparse task specifications, under sensing ranging from accurate motion-capture state to noisy egocentric visual inputs. We distill a universal tracking policy into this controller, compress motor skills into a compact latent space, and apply reinforcement learning finetuning to expand coverage and improve robustness under out-of-distribution scenarios. This enables coordinated whole-body behavior from sparse intent without test-time reference motions. We evaluate ULTRA in simulation and on a real Unitree G1 humanoid. Results show that ULTRA generalizes to autonomous, goal-conditioned whole-body loco-manipulation from egocentric perception, consistently outperforming tracking-only baselines with limited skills.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_03279
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ULTRA: Unified Multimodal Control for Autonomous Humanoid Whole-Body Loco-Manipulation
He, Xialin
Xu, Sirui
Li, Xinyao
Dong, Runpei
Bian, Liuyu
Wang, Yu-Xiong
Gui, Liang-Yan
Robotics
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Achieving autonomous and versatile whole-body loco-manipulation remains a central barrier to making humanoids practically useful. Yet existing approaches are fundamentally constrained: retargeted data are often scarce or low-quality; methods struggle to scale to large skill repertoires; and, most importantly, they rely on tracking predefined motion references rather than generating behavior from perception and high-level task specifications. To address these limitations, we propose ULTRA, a unified framework with two key components. First, we introduce a physics-driven neural retargeting algorithm that translates large-scale motion capture to humanoid embodiments while preserving physical plausibility for contact-rich interactions. Second, we learn a unified multimodal controller that supports both dense references and sparse task specifications, under sensing ranging from accurate motion-capture state to noisy egocentric visual inputs. We distill a universal tracking policy into this controller, compress motor skills into a compact latent space, and apply reinforcement learning finetuning to expand coverage and improve robustness under out-of-distribution scenarios. This enables coordinated whole-body behavior from sparse intent without test-time reference motions. We evaluate ULTRA in simulation and on a real Unitree G1 humanoid. Results show that ULTRA generalizes to autonomous, goal-conditioned whole-body loco-manipulation from egocentric perception, consistently outperforming tracking-only baselines with limited skills.
title ULTRA: Unified Multimodal Control for Autonomous Humanoid Whole-Body Loco-Manipulation
topic Robotics
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.03279