Brace Yourself: Task-Conditioned Environmental Bracing for Forceful Humanoid Manipulation

Abstract

Forceful manipulation is challenging for humanoid robots because interaction forces can disturb whole-body balance. We introduce the Supporting Hand Strategy (SHS), which enables a humanoid to brace against the environment with one hand while performing forceful manipulation with the other. SHS optimises a task-conditioned support configuration that guides two synchronous reinforcement-learning policies, without human motion data or online whole-body trajectory planning. On a Unitree G1, SHS achieved usable contact forces up to 60 N, compared with a maximum sustained force of 13.5 N without environmental bracing, while substantially improving force tracking over a task-independent support configuration. The same policies generalised to different task regions without retraining. SHS therefore provides a simple mechanism for substantially extending humanoid forceful-manipulation capability.

Submitted to IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L). 8 pages, 6 figures. Video demonstration: https://youtu.be/zPrGLxWJzI4. This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be accessible