SEEC: Stable End-Effector Control with Model-Enhanced Residual Learning for Humanoid Loco-Manipulation

Abstract

Arm end-effector stabilization is essential for humanoid loco-manipulation tasks, yet it remains challenging due to the high degrees of freedom and inherent dynamic instability of bipedal robot structures. Previous model-based controllers achieve precise end-effector control but rely on precise dynamics modeling and estimation, which often struggle to capture real-world factors (e.g., friction and backlash) and thus degrade in practice. On the other hand, learning-based methods can better mitigate these factors via exploration and domain randomization, and have shown potential in real-world use. However, they often overfit to training conditions, requiring retraining with the entire body, and still struggle to adapt to unseen scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose a novel stable end-effector control (SEEC) framework with model-enhanced residual learning that learns to achieve precise and robust end-effector compensation for lower-body induced disturbances through model-guided reinforcement learning (RL) with a perturbation generator. This design allows the upper-body policy to achieve accurate end-effector stabilization as well as adapt to unseen locomotion controllers with no additional training. We validate our framework in different simulators and transfer trained policies to the Booster T1 humanoid robot. Experiments demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms baselines and robustly handles diverse and demanding loco-manipulation tasks.