Search arXivSearch

arXiv · 2507.17141

Towards Human-level Intelligence via Human-like Whole-Body Manipulation

Abstract

Building general-purpose intelligent robots has long been a fundamental goal of robotics. A promising approach is to mirror the evolutionary trajectory of humans: learning through continuous interaction with the environment, with early progress driven by the imitation of human behaviors. Achieving this goal presents three core challenges: (1) designing safe robotic hardware with human-level physical capabilities; (2) developing an intuitive and scalable whole-body teleoperation interface for data collection; and (3) creating algorithms capable of learning whole-body visuomotor policies from human demonstrations. To address these challenges in a unified framework, we propose Astribot Suite, a robot learning suite for whole-body manipulation aimed at general daily tasks across diverse environments. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our system on a wide range of activities that require whole-body coordination, extensive reachability, human-level dexterity, and agility. Our results show that Astribot's cohesive integration of embodiment, teleoperation interface, and learning pipeline marks a significant step towards real-world, general-purpose whole-body robotic manipulation, laying the groundwork for the next generation of intelligent robots.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Guang Gao, Jianan Wang, Jinbo Zuo, Junnan Jiang, Jingfan Zhang, Xianwen Zeng, Yuejiang Zhu, Lianyang Ma, Ke Chen, Minhua Sheng, Ruirui Zhang, Zhaohui An. 2025-07-23. Towards Human-level Intelligence via Human-like Whole-Body Manipulation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.17141

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

Highly-Efficient Differentiable Simulation for Robotics

Robotics simulators have improved significantly in computational speed and scalability, enabling them to generate years of simulated data for complex systems in minutes or hours. Despite these advances, efficiently and accurately computing simulation derivatives remains an open challenge. Addressing this would accelerate the convergence of reinforcement learning and trajectory optimization algorithms, particularly for contact-rich problems. This paper introduces a unifying framework for robotic simulation that accounts for all factors, including dynamics, collisions, and friction. The resulting algorithm computes analytical derivatives of the simulation by implicit differentiation, explicitly handling the intrinsic non-smoothness of the collision and frictional stages while exploiting the sparsity induced by the multi-body structure. Benchmark results demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, with timings ranging from $5\,μ$s for a 7-dof manipulator to $95\,μ$s for a 36-dof humanoid, an improvement of at least two orders of magnitude over alternative methods. Implemented in C++, the code will be open-sourced after the review process to support applications such as simulation-driven learning and real-time control.

cs.RO

GeCCo -- a Generalist Contact-Conditioned Policy for Loco-Manipulation Skills on Legged Robots

Most modern approaches to quadruped locomotion focus on using Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) to learn policies from scratch, in an end-to-end manner. Such methods often fail to scale, as every new problem or application requires time-consuming and iterative reward definition and tuning. We present Generalist Contact-Conditioned Policy (GeCCo) --- a low-level policy trained with Deep Reinforcement Learning that is capable of tracking arbitrary contact points with a quadruped robot. We shift from task-specific end-to-end learning to a modular hierarchy in which a single planner-agnostic, contact-conditioned tracking policy serves as a robust interface between planning and control. By maintaining stable contact execution under dynamic uncertainty and planner mismatch, the policy enables high-level planners (e.g., handcrafted, learned, or optimization-based) to be composed and swapped without retraining. We demonstrate the scalability and robustness of our method by evaluating on a wide range of locomotion and manipulation tasks in a common framework and under a single generalist policy. These include a variety of gaits, traversing complex terrains (e.g., stairs and slopes) as well as previously unseen stepping-stones and narrow beams, and interacting with objects (e.g., pressing a button, pushing a barrel). Our framework acquires new behaviors more efficiently, simply by combining a task-specific high-level contact planner and the pre-trained generalist policy. Project website: https://vassil-atn.github.io/gecco.github.io

cs.RO

ERUPT: An Open Toolkit for Interfacing with Robot Motion Planners in Extended Reality

We present the Extended Reality Universal Planning Toolkit (ERUPT), an extended reality (XR) system for interactive motion planning. This paper serves to introduce our open-source system to others who can use it as a base to develop immersive robot interaction applications. Our system allows users to create and dynamically reconfigure environments while they plan robot paths. ERUPT uses XR to provide a broad range of natural interaction capabilities, allowing users to grab and adjust objects in the environment similar to interaction in the real world, rather than using a mouse and keyboard with the scene projected onto a 2D computer screen. Our system integrates with MoveIt, a manipulation planning framework, allowing users to send motion planning requests and visualize the resulting robot paths in virtual or augmented reality. We provide a broad range of interaction modalities, allowing users to modify objects in the environment and interact with a virtual robot. Our system allows operators to visualize robot motions, ensuring desired behavior as it moves throughout the environment, without risk of collisions within a virtual space, and to then deploy planned paths on physical robots in the real world. Code can be found at https://github.com/parasollab/erupt.

cs.RO