Abstract
Humanoid whole-body control requires a robot to track diverse reference motions while maintaining balance under gravity, torque limits, contact switching, and external disturbances. Existing reinforcement-learning-based trackers typically learn control outputs that jointly address motion tracking and balance. However, similar reference poses can correspond to substantially different dynamic demands, requiring a unified policy to learn motion-dependent control requirements alongside balance corrections. This can complicate learning and lead to high-frequency fluctuations in control outputs. We propose DKWBC, a dynamics-informed whole-body control framework that combines explicit model-based tracking with a learned balancing residual. Inspired by the model-based and environmental-wrench contributions to joint torques in floating-base dynamics, DKWBC uses inverse-dynamics feedforward and joint PD feedback to supply tracking torques, while a residual policy learns additional joint-torque corrections for balanced execution. By explicitly accounting for motion-dependent torque demands, this structure simplifies the policy's learning task. Experiments in simulation and on real hardware demonstrate that a single learned balancing policy generalizes across motion datasets while maintaining accurate motion tracking and balance across ground support, attached payloads, and physical interaction. Project page: this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09605
