2024/07/30 by Pranay Dugar, Aayam Shrestha, Dugar, Pranay +7 · 9 citations
Engineering · #Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Prosthetics and Rehabilitation Robotics #Robotic Locomotion and Control #Robotics (cs.RO)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2408.07295
openalex publication_date 2024/07/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
A major challenge in humanoid robotics is designing a unified interface for commanding diverse whole-body behaviors, from precise footstep sequences to partial-body mimicry and joystick teleoperation. We introduce the Masked Humanoid Controller (MHC), a learned whole-body controller that exposes a simple yet expressive interface: the specification of masked target trajectories over selected subsets of the robot's state variables. This unified abstraction allows high-level systems to issue commands in a flexible format that accommodates multi-modal inputs such as optimized trajectories, motion capture clips, re-targeted video, and real-time joystick signals. The MHC is trained in simulation using a curriculum that spans this full range of modalities, enabling robust execution of partially specified behaviors while maintaining balance and disturbance rejection. We demonstrate the MHC both in simulation and on the real-world Digit V3 humanoid, showing that a single learned controller is capable of executing such diverse whole-body commands in the real world through a common representational interface.