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arXiv · 2505.24198

Hold My Beer: Learning Gentle Humanoid Locomotion and End-Effector Stabilization Control

Yitang Li·Yuanhang Zhang·Wenli Xiao·Chaoyi Pan·Haoyang Weng·Guanqi He·Tairan He·Guanya Shi
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Abstract

Can your humanoid walk up and hand you a full cup of beer, without spilling a drop? While humanoids are increasingly featured in flashy demos like dancing, delivering packages, traversing rough terrain, fine-grained control during locomotion remains a significant challenge. In particular, stabilizing a filled end-effector (EE) while walking is far from solved, due to a fundamental mismatch in task dynamics: locomotion demands slow-timescale, robust control, whereas EE stabilization requires rapid, high-precision corrections. To address this, we propose SoFTA, a Slow-Fast Two-Agent framework that decouples upper-body and lower-body control into separate agents operating at different frequencies and with distinct rewards. This temporal and objective separation mitigates policy interference and enables coordinated whole-body behavior. SoFTA executes upper-body actions at 100 Hz for precise EE control and lower-body actions at 50 Hz for robust gait. It reduces EE acceleration by 2-5x relative to baselines and performs much closer to human-level stability, enabling delicate tasks such as carrying nearly full cups, capturing steady video during locomotion, and disturbance rejection with EE stability.

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Yitang Li, Yuanhang Zhang, Wenli Xiao, Chaoyi Pan, Haoyang Weng, Guanqi He, Tairan He, Guanya Shi. 2025-06-03. Hold My Beer: Learning Gentle Humanoid Locomotion and End-Effector Stabilization Control. https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.24198

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