HANDOFF: Humanoid Agentic Task-Space Whole-Body Control via Distilled Complementary Teachers

Abstract:For a humanoid robot to be deployed in the real world, the choice of command space (i.e., the interface between task planning and whole-body control) is crucial. Existing whole-body controllers typically demand dense kinematic or spatial references that planners struggle to synthesize from task semantics. We instead propose a compact, explicit interface that is intuitive, general, modular, and expressive enough for diverse manipulation skills. To this end, we introduce HANDOFF, a single humanoid whole-body controller that follows this interface and is distilled via multi-teacher KL distillation under a context-conditioned gating scheme into a mixture-of-experts student from three complementary specialists: whole-body motion tracking with safety-filtered data, locomotion, and fall-recovery. On the Unitree G1, HANDOFF matches state-of-the-art velocity tracking and offers one of the largest robust manipulation workspaces. We further demonstrate hardware feasibility through multiple natural-language-driven task roll-outs, powered by a VLM-driven agentic planner with no task-specific data or controller fine-tuning.

Robotics (cs.RO); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Machine Learning (cs.LG)

arXiv:2606.06493 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2606.06493v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.06493 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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