Whole-body manipulation (WBM) for humanoid robots presents a promising approach for executing embracing tasks involving bulky objects, where traditional grasping relying on end-effectors only remains limited in such scenarios due to inherent stability and payload constraints. This paper introduces a reinforcement learning framework that integrates a pre-trained human motion prior with a neural signed distance field (NSDF) representation to achieve robust whole-body embracing. Our method leverages a teacher-student architecture to distill large-scale human motion data, generating kinematically natural and physically feasible whole-body motion patterns. This facilitates coordinated control across the arms and torso, enabling stable multi-contact interactions that enhance the robustness in manipulation and also the load capacity. The embedded NSDF further provides accurate and continuous geometric perception, improving contact awareness throughout long-horizon tasks. We thoroughly evaluate the approach through comprehensive simulations and real-world experiments. The results demonstrate improved adaptability to diverse shapes and sizes of objects and also successful sim-to-real transfer. These indicate that the proposed framework offers an effective and practical solution for multi-contact and long-horizon WBM tasks of humanoid robots.
@article{arxiv.2509.13534,
title = {Embracing Bulky Objects with Humanoid Robots: Whole-Body Manipulation with Reinforcement Learning},
author = {Chunxin Zheng and Kai Chen and Zhihai Bi and Yulin Li and Liang Pan and Jinni Zhou and Haoang Li and Jun Ma},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.13534},
year = {2025}
}