HumanoidUMI: Bridging Robot-Free Demonstrations and Humanoid Whole-Body Manipulation
This work addresses the bottleneck of costly teleoperation for humanoid data collection, offering a scalable alternative for whole-body skill learning.
HumanoidUMI proposes a portable, robot-free framework using VR devices and grippers to collect human demonstrations for humanoid whole-body manipulation, enabling transferable skill learning across five real-world tasks.
High-quality demonstration data are essential for humanoid robot skill learning, especially for whole-body behaviors that require coordinated perception, locomotion, and manipulation. Existing data-collection methods largely rely on robot teleoperation, which is constrained by hardware accessibility, operator expertise, and limited efficiency. Inspired by the Universal Manipulation Interface (UMI), we propose HumanoidUMI, a portable and robot-free framework for humanoid whole-body data collection. HumanoidUMI uses lightweight VR devices and UMI-inspired grippers to collect sparse human keypoint trajectories, wrist-view observations, and gripper actions. These demonstrations train a high-level policy to predict future keypoints, which are retargeted to robot-native whole-body references and executed by a whole-body controller. Experiments in five real-world scenarios demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework and validate the collected demonstrations for transferable humanoid whole-body skill learning.