Qingwei Ben

RO
h-index40
10papers
431citations
Novelty55%
AI Score58

10 Papers

ROJul 15, 2024Code
GRUtopia: Dream General Robots in a City at Scale

Hanqing Wang, Jiahe Chen, Wensi Huang et al.

Recent works have been exploring the scaling laws in the field of Embodied AI. Given the prohibitive costs of collecting real-world data, we believe the Simulation-to-Real (Sim2Real) paradigm is a crucial step for scaling the learning of embodied models. This paper introduces project GRUtopia, the first simulated interactive 3D society designed for various robots. It features several advancements: (a) The scene dataset, GRScenes, includes 100k interactive, finely annotated scenes, which can be freely combined into city-scale environments. In contrast to previous works mainly focusing on home, GRScenes covers 89 diverse scene categories, bridging the gap of service-oriented environments where general robots would be initially deployed. (b) GRResidents, a Large Language Model (LLM) driven Non-Player Character (NPC) system that is responsible for social interaction, task generation, and task assignment, thus simulating social scenarios for embodied AI applications. (c) The benchmark, GRBench, supports various robots but focuses on legged robots as primary agents and poses moderately challenging tasks involving Object Loco-Navigation, Social Loco-Navigation, and Loco-Manipulation. We hope that this work can alleviate the scarcity of high-quality data in this field and provide a more comprehensive assessment of Embodied AI research. The project is available at https://github.com/OpenRobotLab/GRUtopia.

ROJun 3
GRAIL: Generating Humanoid Loco-Manipulation from 3D Assets and Video Priors

Tianyi Xie, Haotian Zhang, Jinhyung Park et al.

Scaling humanoid loco-manipulation requires robot-compatible demonstrations across diverse objects, whole-body motions, and scene geometries, but teleoperation and motion capture are difficult to scale because each collection depends on physical setups, instrumented actors, and robot operation. We present GRAIL, a digital generation pipeline that remains fully virtual until deployment: it composes 3D assets, simulator-ready scenes, and priors from video foundation models (VFMs) to synthesize interactions without rebuilding physical environments or teleoperating the robot. Rather than reconstructing unconstrained in-the-wild videos, GRAIL starts from fully specified 3D configurations in which object geometry, camera parameters, metric scale, environment depth, and a robot-proportioned character are known before video generation and reused during reconstruction. This privileged setup better conditions 4D recovery, allowing model-based object tracking, human motion estimation, and interaction-aware optimization to reconstruct metric 4D human-object interaction (HOI) trajectories with reduced depth ambiguity and morphology mismatch. We retarget the recovered motions to a humanoid robot and train complementary task-general trackers: an object-aware latent adaptor for manipulation and a scene-aware tracker for terrain traversal. GRAIL produces over 20,000 sequences spanning pick-up, object manipulation, sitting, and terrain traversal. Using only GRAIL-generated data, we train egocentric visual policies through a sim-to-real pipeline and deploy them on a Unitree G1 humanoid, achieving 84\% real-world success on diverse object pick-up and 90\% success on stair-climbing.

RONov 11, 2025
SONIC: Supersizing Motion Tracking for Natural Humanoid Whole-Body Control

Zhengyi Luo, Ye Yuan, Tingwu Wang et al.

Despite the rise of billion-parameter foundation models trained across thousands of GPUs, similar scaling gains have not been shown for humanoid control. Current neural controllers for humanoids remain modest in size, target a limited behavior set, and are trained on a handful of GPUs over several days. We show that scaling up model capacity, data, and compute yields a generalist humanoid controller capable of creating natural and robust whole-body movements. Specifically, we posit motion tracking as a natural and scalable task for humanoid control, leverageing dense supervision from diverse motion-capture data to acquire human motion priors without manual reward engineering. We build a foundation model for motion tracking by scaling along three axes: network size (from 1.2M to 42M parameters), dataset volume (over 100M frames, 700 hours of high-quality motion data), and compute (9k GPU hours). Beyond demonstrating the benefits of scale, we show the practical utility of our model through two mechanisms: (1) a real-time universal kinematic planner that bridges motion tracking to downstream task execution, enabling natural and interactive control, and (2) a unified token space that supports various motion input interfaces, such as VR teleoperation devices, human videos, and vision-language-action (VLA) models, all using the same policy. Scaling motion tracking exhibits favorable properties: performance improves steadily with increased compute and data diversity, and learned representations generalize to unseen motions, establishing motion tracking at scale as a practical foundation for humanoid control.

ROFeb 18, 2025Code
HOMIE: Humanoid Loco-Manipulation with Isomorphic Exoskeleton Cockpit

Qingwei Ben, Feiyu Jia, Jia Zeng et al.

Generalizable humanoid loco-manipulation poses significant challenges, requiring coordinated whole-body control and precise, contact-rich object manipulation. To address this, this paper introduces HOMIE, a semi-autonomous teleoperation system that combines a reinforcement learning policy for body control mapped to a pedal, an isomorphic exoskeleton arm for arm control, and motion-sensing gloves for hand control, forming a unified cockpit to freely operate humanoids and establish a data flywheel. The policy incorporates novel designs, including an upper-body pose curriculum, a height-tracking reward, and symmetry utilization. These features enable the system to perform walking and squatting to specific heights while seamlessly adapting to arbitrary upper-body poses. The exoskeleton, by eliminating the reliance on inverse dynamics, delivers faster and more precise arm control. The gloves utilize Hall sensors instead of servos, allowing even compact devices to achieve 15 or more degrees of freedom and freely adapt to any model of dexterous hands. Compared to previous teleoperation systems, HOMIE stands out for its exceptional efficiency, completing tasks in half the time; its expanded working range, allowing users to freely reach high and low areas as well as interact with any objects; and its affordability, with a price of just $500. The system is fully open-source, demos and code can be found in our https://homietele.github.io/.

RONov 30, 2025
Opening the Sim-to-Real Door for Humanoid Pixel-to-Action Policy Transfer

Haoru Xue, Tairan He, Zi Wang et al.

Recent progress in GPU-accelerated, photorealistic simulation has opened a scalable data-generation path for robot learning, where massive physics and visual randomization allow policies to generalize beyond curated environments. Building on these advances, we develop a teacher-student-bootstrap learning framework for vision-based humanoid loco-manipulation, using articulated-object interaction as a representative high-difficulty benchmark. Our approach introduces a staged-reset exploration strategy that stabilizes long-horizon privileged-policy training, and a GRPO-based fine-tuning procedure that mitigates partial observability and improves closed-loop consistency in sim-to-real RL. Trained entirely on simulation data, the resulting policy achieves robust zero-shot performance across diverse door types and outperforms human teleoperators by up to 31.7% in task completion time under the same whole-body control stack. This represents the first humanoid sim-to-real policy capable of diverse articulated loco-manipulation using pure RGB perception.

ROMar 30
Feel Robot Feels: Tactile Feedback Array Glove for Dexterous Manipulation

Feiyu Jia, Xiaojie Niu, Sizhe Yang et al.

Teleoperation is a key approach for collecting high-quality, physically consistent demonstrations for robotic manipulation. However, teleoperation for dexterous manipulation remains constrained by: (i) inaccurate hand-robot motion mapping, which limits teleoperated dexterity, and (ii) limited tactile feedback that forces vision-dominated interaction and hinders perception of contact geometry and force variation. To address these challenges, we present TAG, a low-cost glove system that integrates precise hand motion capture with high-resolution tactile feedback, enabling effective tactile-in-the-loop dexterous teleoperation. For motion capture, TAG employs a non-contact magnetic sensing design that provides drift-free, electromagnetically robust 21-DoF joint tracking with joint angle estimation errors below 1 degree. Meanwhile, to restore tactile sensation, TAG equips each finger with a 32-actuator tactile array within a compact 2 cm^2 module, allowing operators to directly feel physical interactions at the robot end-effector through spatial activation patterns. Through real-world teleoperation experiments and user studies, we show that TAG enables reliable real-time perception of contact geometry and dynamic force, improves success rates in contact-rich teleoperation tasks, and increases the reliability of demonstration data collection for learning-based manipulation.

ROMar 15
One-Policy-Fits-All: Geometry-Aware Action Latents for Cross-Embodiment Manipulation

Juncheng Mu, Sizhe Yang, Hojin Bae et al.

Cross-embodiment manipulation is crucial for enhancing the scalability of robot manipulation and reducing the high cost of data collection. However, the significant differences between embodiments, such as variations in action spaces and structural disparities, pose challenges for joint training across multiple sources of data. To address this, we propose One-Policy-Fits-All (OPFA), a framework that enables learning a single, versatile policy across multiple embodiments. We first learn a Geometry-Aware Latent Representation (GaLR), which leverages 3D convolution networks and transformers to build a shared latent action space across different embodiments. Then we design a unified latent retargeting decoder that extracts embodiment-specific actions from the latent representations, without any embodiment-specific decoder tuning. OPFA enables end-to-end co-training of data from diverse embodiments, including various grippers and dexterous hands with arbitrary degrees of freedom, significantly improving data efficiency and reducing the cost of skill transfer. We conduct extensive experiments across 11 different end-effectors. The results demonstrate that OPFA significantly improves policy performance in diverse settings by leveraging heterogeneous embodiment data. For instance, cross-embodiment co-training can improve success rates by more than 50% compared to single-source training. Moreover, by adding only a few demonstrations from a new embodiment (e.g., eight), OPFA can achieve performance comparable to that of a well-trained model with 72 demonstrations.

ROMay 19, 2025Code
TeleOpBench: A Simulator-Centric Benchmark for Dual-Arm Dexterous Teleoperation

Hangyu Li, Qin Zhao, Haoran Xu et al.

Teleoperation is a cornerstone of embodied-robot learning, and bimanual dexterous teleoperation in particular provides rich demonstrations that are difficult to obtain with fully autonomous systems. While recent studies have proposed diverse hardware pipelines-ranging from inertial motion-capture gloves to exoskeletons and vision-based interfaces-there is still no unified benchmark that enables fair, reproducible comparison of these systems. In this paper, we introduce TeleOpBench, a simulator-centric benchmark tailored to bimanual dexterous teleoperation. TeleOpBench contains 30 high-fidelity task environments that span pick-and-place, tool use, and collaborative manipulation, covering a broad spectrum of kinematic and force-interaction difficulty. Within this benchmark we implement four representative teleoperation modalities-(i) MoCap, (ii) VR device, (iii) arm-hand exoskeletons, and (iv) monocular vision tracking-and evaluate them with a common protocol and metric suite. To validate that performance in simulation is predictive of real-world behavior, we conduct mirrored experiments on a physical dual-arm platform equipped with two 6-DoF dexterous hands. Across 10 held-out tasks we observe a strong correlation between simulator and hardware performance, confirming the external validity of TeleOpBench. TeleOpBench establishes a common yardstick for teleoperation research and provides an extensible platform for future algorithmic and hardware innovation. Codes is now available at https://github.com/cyjdlhy/TeleOpBench .

ROFeb 14, 2025
BeamDojo: Learning Agile Humanoid Locomotion on Sparse Footholds

Huayi Wang, Zirui Wang, Junli Ren et al.

Traversing risky terrains with sparse footholds poses a significant challenge for humanoid robots, requiring precise foot placements and stable locomotion. Existing learning-based approaches often struggle on such complex terrains due to sparse foothold rewards and inefficient learning processes. To address these challenges, we introduce BeamDojo, a reinforcement learning (RL) framework designed for enabling agile humanoid locomotion on sparse footholds. BeamDojo begins by introducing a sampling-based foothold reward tailored for polygonal feet, along with a double critic to balancing the learning process between dense locomotion rewards and sparse foothold rewards. To encourage sufficient trial-and-error exploration, BeamDojo incorporates a two-stage RL approach: the first stage relaxes the terrain dynamics by training the humanoid on flat terrain while providing it with task-terrain perceptive observations, and the second stage fine-tunes the policy on the actual task terrain. Moreover, we implement a onboard LiDAR-based elevation map to enable real-world deployment. Extensive simulation and real-world experiments demonstrate that BeamDojo achieves efficient learning in simulation and enables agile locomotion with precise foot placement on sparse footholds in the real world, maintaining a high success rate even under significant external disturbances.

ROFeb 12, 2025
Learning Humanoid Standing-up Control across Diverse Postures

Tao Huang, Junli Ren, Huayi Wang et al.

Standing-up control is crucial for humanoid robots, with the potential for integration into current locomotion and loco-manipulation systems, such as fall recovery. Existing approaches are either limited to simulations that overlook hardware constraints or rely on predefined ground-specific motion trajectories, failing to enable standing up across postures in real-world scenes. To bridge this gap, we present HoST (Humanoid Standing-up Control), a reinforcement learning framework that learns standing-up control from scratch, enabling robust sim-to-real transfer across diverse postures. HoST effectively learns posture-adaptive motions by leveraging a multi-critic architecture and curriculum-based training on diverse simulated terrains. To ensure successful real-world deployment, we constrain the motion with smoothness regularization and implicit motion speed bound to alleviate oscillatory and violent motions on physical hardware, respectively. After simulation-based training, the learned control policies are directly deployed on the Unitree G1 humanoid robot. Our experimental results demonstrate that the controllers achieve smooth, stable, and robust standing-up motions across a wide range of laboratory and outdoor environments. Videos and code are available at https://taohuang13.github.io/humanoid-standingup.github.io/.