[Paper] HANDOFF: Humanoid Agentic Task-Space Whole-Body Control via Distilled Complementary Teachers
Source: arXiv - 2606.06493v1
Overview
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.
Key Contributions
This paper presents research in the following areas:
- cs.RO
- cs.AI
- cs.LG
Methodology
Please refer to the full paper for detailed methodology.
Practical Implications
This research contributes to the advancement of cs.RO.
Authors
- Lizhi Yang
- Junheng Li
- Nehar Poddar
- Yiling Hou
- Gio Huh
- Robert Griffin
- Georgia Gkioxari
- Aaron Ames
Paper Information
- arXiv ID: 2606.06493v1
- Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI, cs.LG
- Published: June 4, 2026
- PDF: Download PDF