ULTRA: Unified Multimodal Control for Autonomous Humanoid Whole-Body Loco-Manipulation

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2603.03279v1
• Date: Tue, 03 Mar 2026 18:59:29 GMT
• Title: ULTRA: Unified Multimodal Control for Autonomous Humanoid Whole-Body Loco-Manipulation
• Abstract summary: We introduce a physics-driven neural algorithm that translates large-scale motion capture to humanoid embodiments.<n>We learn a unified multimodal controller that supports both dense references and sparse task specifications.<n>Results show that ULTRA generalizes to autonomous, goal-conditioned whole-body loco-manipulation from egocentric perception.
• Score: 55.467742403416175
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Achieving autonomous and versatile whole-body loco-manipulation remains a central barrier to making humanoids practically useful. Yet existing approaches are fundamentally constrained: retargeted data are often scarce or low-quality; methods struggle to scale to large skill repertoires; and, most importantly, they rely on tracking predefined motion references rather than generating behavior from perception and high-level task specifications. To address these limitations, we propose ULTRA, a unified framework with two key components. First, we introduce a physics-driven neural retargeting algorithm that translates large-scale motion capture to humanoid embodiments while preserving physical plausibility for contact-rich interactions. Second, we learn a unified multimodal controller that supports both dense references and sparse task specifications, under sensing ranging from accurate motion-capture state to noisy egocentric visual inputs. We distill a universal tracking policy into this controller, compress motor skills into a compact latent space, and apply reinforcement learning finetuning to expand coverage and improve robustness under out-of-distribution scenarios. This enables coordinated whole-body behavior from sparse intent without test-time reference motions. We evaluate ULTRA in simulation and on a real Unitree G1 humanoid. Results show that ULTRA generalizes to autonomous, goal-conditioned whole-body loco-manipulation from egocentric perception, consistently outperforming tracking-only baselines with limited skills.

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