RoboPapers Ep#24: CLONE: Closed-Loop Whole-Body Humanoid Teleoperation for Long-Horizon Tasks
How can we control humanoid robots to get them to perform a variety of challenging, real-world tasks while moving around in their environments? Yixuan Li and Siyuan Huang of BIGAI tell us how their complex system works.
Abstract:
Humanoid teleoperation plays a vital role in demonstrating and collecting data for complex humanoid-scene interactions. However, current teleoperation systems face critical limitations: they decouple upper- and lower-body control to maintain stability, restricting natural coordination, and operate open-loop without real-time position feedback, leading to accumulated drift. The fundamental challenge is achieving precise, coordinated whole-body teleoperation over extended durations while maintaining accurate global positioning. Here we show that an MoE-based teleoperation system, CLONE, with closed-loop error correction enables unprecedented whole-body teleoperation fidelity, maintaining minimal positional drift over long-range trajectories using only head and hand tracking from an MR headset. Unlike previous methods that either sacrifice coordination for stability or suffer from unbounded drift, CLONE learns diverse motion skills while preventing tracking error accumulation through real-time feedback, enabling complex coordinated movements such as “picking up objects from the ground.” These results establish a new milestone for whole-body humanoid teleoperation for long-horizon humanoid-scene interaction tasks.
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