Whole-Body UMI: Transferring UMI Manipulation Skills to Humanoid Whole-Body Manipulation via Real-Time Motion Generation

Abstract:Collecting whole-body demonstrations for humanoid manipulation mostly relies on teleoperation, which is costly and hard to scale up. The Universal Manipulation Interface (UMI) provides a scalable data collection paradigm, but end-effector trajectories alone underdetermine humanoid whole-body coordination, which is insufficient for whole-body demonstration collection. Therefore, we introduce Whole-Body UMI (WB-UMI), a task-agnostic, real-time and end-effector conditioned motion generator that decouples whole-body coordination learning from task semantics learning through a shared end-effector interface. A diffusion policy learns from native UMI demonstrations, while WB-UMI learns independently from retargeted motion capture, requiring no body trackers or paired image--whole-body demonstrations during task-specific data collection. In real deployment, an asynchronous hierarchy integrates the diffusion policy, motion generator, and a whole-body controller with latency compensation and measured-state feedback. Real-robot experiments on G1 support real-time closed-loop transfer across four tasks, achieving 90% success in drawer closing, 80% in shelf pick-and-place, 30% in ball toss, and 40% in Loco-PnP, which shows the effectiveness of this hierarchy in transferring native UMI skills to humanoid whole-body manipulation.

8 pages, 5 figures. Project website: this https URL

Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2609.22829 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2609.22829v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.22829 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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