English

WaveMan: mmWave-Based Room-Scale Human Interaction Perception for Humanoid Robots

Robotics 2026-01-13 v1

Abstract

Reliable humanoid-robot interaction (HRI) in household environments is constrained by two fundamental requirements, namely robustness to unconstrained user positions and preservation of user privacy. Millimeter-wave (mmWave) sensing inherently supports privacy-preserving interaction, making it a promising modality for room-scale HRI. However, existing mmWave-based interaction-sensing systems exhibit poor spatial generalization at unseen distances or viewpoints. To address this challenge, we introduce WaveMan, a spatially adaptive room-scale perception system that restores reliable human interaction sensing across arbitrary user positions. WaveMan integrates viewpoint alignment and spectrogram enhancement for spatial consistency, with dual-channel attention for robust feature extraction. Experiments across five participants show that, under fixed-position evaluation, WaveMan achieves the same cross-position accuracy as the baseline with five times fewer training positions. In random free-position testing, accuracy increases from 33.00% to 94.33%, enabled by the proposed method. These results demonstrate the feasibility of reliable, privacy-preserving interaction for household humanoid robots across unconstrained user positions.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2601.07454,
  title  = {WaveMan: mmWave-Based Room-Scale Human Interaction Perception for Humanoid Robots},
  author = {Yuxuan Hu and Kuangji Zuo and Boyu Ma and Shihao Li and Zhaoyang Xia and Feng Xu and Jianfei Yang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.07454},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T09:00:36.118Z