English

It Takes Two: Learning Interactive Whole-Body Control Between Humanoid Robots

Robotics 2025-10-14 v1 Multiagent Systems

Abstract

The true promise of humanoid robotics lies beyond single-agent autonomy: two or more humanoids must engage in physically grounded, socially meaningful whole-body interactions that echo the richness of human social interaction. However, single-humanoid methods suffer from the isolation issue, ignoring inter-agent dynamics and causing misaligned contacts, interpenetrations, and unrealistic motions. To address this, we present Harmanoid , a dual-humanoid motion imitation framework that transfers interacting human motions to two robots while preserving both kinematic fidelity and physical realism. Harmanoid comprises two key components: (i) contact-aware motion retargeting, which restores inter-body coordination by aligning SMPL contacts with robot vertices, and (ii) interaction-driven motion controller, which leverages interaction-specific rewards to enforce coordinated keypoints and physically plausible contacts. By explicitly modeling inter-agent contacts and interaction-aware dynamics, Harmanoid captures the coupled behaviors between humanoids that single-humanoid frameworks inherently overlook. Experiments demonstrate that Harmanoid significantly improves interactive motion imitation, surpassing existing single-humanoid frameworks that largely fail in such scenarios.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2510.10206,
  title  = {It Takes Two: Learning Interactive Whole-Body Control Between Humanoid Robots},
  author = {Zuhong Liu and Junhao Ge and Minhao Xiong and Jiahao Gu and Bowei Tang and Wei Jing and Siheng Chen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.10206},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T06:31:22.836Z