KINO: A Keyframe Interface for VLM Planning and Whole-Body Control in Humanoid Loco-Manipulation

Abstract:Humanoid loco-manipulation requires robots to interpret task instructions and scene semantics while executing coordinated whole-body motions. We propose a hierarchical framework that uses motion keyframes as an intermediate representation between Vision-Language Model (VLM) planning and Reinforcement Learning (RL) control. Each keyframe specifies a target whole-body robot pose and, when applicable, an object pose. Given a language instruction, scene observations, and execution feedback, the VLM selects successive task-relevant keyframes from a predefined library. The selected keyframes are retargeted to the current scene to account for object poses and dimensions. A keyframe-conditioned whole-body policy then generates joint-level actions to reach these goals. We introduce a saliency-based keyframe sampling strategy for low-level policy training that improves end-to-end task success rate from 44% to 92% when using sparse VLM keyframes. We evaluate our framework on object pickup, transport, and placement tasks in simulation and on a Unitree G1 humanoid. The system successfully performs both one- and two-handed manipulation and generalises to placement locations beyond the training reference data.

Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2609.18869 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2609.18869v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.18869 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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