Papers for

robotic delivery teams

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Humanoid robots learn to carry objects safely in cluttered spaces

HOTICE: Whole-Body Humanoid Object Transportation in Cluttered Environments

Abstract: Object transportation is a fundamental capability for humanoid robots operating in real-world, human-centric environments, yet existing methods struggle when clutter constrains free space around both the robot and its carried payload. We present HOTICE, a whole-body humanoid learning framework for transporting objects through such cluttered environments. First, we introduce Humanoid-Object Decoupled Potential Fields, which jointly encode collision-avoidance guidance for the robot and the carried object, enabling coordinated, obstacle-aware motion for both. Second, to address the large action space inherent to whole-body loco-manipulation, we design a dual-agent reinforcement learning architecture that decouples upper- and lower-body control while preserving whole-body coordination via shared state observations and rewards. To train a policy that generalizes across diverse cluttered scenes, we further employ a specialist-to-generalist distillation strategy, in which privileged teacher policies are distilled into a single deployable student policy. We evaluate HOTICE in MuJoCo simulation and on a real Unitree G1 humanoid, demonstrating effective and robust object transportation across cluttered scenarios for objects of varying shapes. Our results show that HOTICE reliably coordinates whole-body motion and object-aware collision avoidance, generalizing effectively to previously unseen cluttered environments while achieving strong performance in sim2real deployment.

Mon 21 SeptRobotics
The gist
Carrying objects through tight, cluttered spaces is hard for robots because they need to avoid bumping into things while holding items. The authors created HOTICE, a new system that helps humanoid robots move both their bodies and the items they carry carefully around obstacles. They made robots smarter by splitting control between upper and lower body parts and teaching them with examples of expert behaviors. Their approach works well in simulations and on a real robot, handling different shapes and layouts.
Open → 2609.25363v1