[2603.03751] Interaction-Aware Whole-Body Control for Compliant Object Transport

Computer Science > Robotics arXiv:2603.03751 (cs) [Submitted on 4 Mar 2026] Title:Interaction-Aware Whole-Body Control for Compliant Object Transport Authors:Hao Zhang, Yves Tseng, Ding Zhao, H. Eric Tseng View a PDF of the paper titled Interaction-Aware Whole-Body Control for Compliant Object Transport, by Hao Zhang and 3 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Cooperative object transport in unstructured environments remains challenging for assistive humanoids because strong, time-varying interaction forces can make tracking-centric whole-body control unreliable, especially in close-contact support tasks. This paper proposes a bio-inspired, interaction-oriented whole-body control (IO-WBC) that functions as an artificial cerebellum - an adaptive motor agent that translates upstream (skill-level) commands into stable, physically consistent whole-body behavior under contact. This work structurally separates upper-body interaction execution from lower-body support control, enabling the robot to maintain balance while shaping force exchange in a tightly coupled robot-object system. A trajectory-optimized reference generator (RG) provides a kinematic prior, while a reinforcement learning (RL) policy governs body responses under heavy-load interactions and disturbances. The policy is trained in simulation with randomized payload mass/inertia and external perturbations, and deployed via asymmetric teacher-student distillation so that the student relies only on propri...