SkillBlender: Towards Versatile Humanoid Whole-Body Loco-Manipulation via Skill Blending

TMLR Paper6216 Authors

Abstract: Humanoid robots hold significant potential in accomplishing daily tasks across diverse environments thanks to their flexibility and human-like morphology. Recent works have made significant progress in humanoid whole-body control and loco-manipulation leveraging optimal control or reinforcement learning. However, these methods require tedious task-specific tuning for each task to achieve satisfactory behaviors, limiting their versatility and scalability to diverse tasks in daily scenarios. To that end, we introduce **SkillBlender**, a novel hierarchical reinforcement learning framework for **versatile** humanoid loco-manipulation. SkillBlender first pretrains goal-conditioned task-agnostic primitive skills, and then dynamically blends these skills to accomplish complex loco-manipulation tasks **with minimal task-specific reward engineering**. We also introduce **SkillBench**, a parallel, cross-embodiment, and diverse simulated benchmark containing three embodiments, four primitive skills, and eight challenging loco-manipulation tasks, accompanied by a set of scientific evaluation metrics balancing accuracy and feasibility. Extensive simulated experiments show that our method significantly outperforms all baselines, while naturally regularizing behaviors to avoid reward hacking, resulting in more accurate and feasible movements for diverse loco-manipulation tasks in our daily scenarios. Our code and benchmark will be open-sourced to the community to facilitate future research.

Submission Type: Regular submission (no more than 12 pages of main content)

Assigned Action Editor: ~Sergey_Plis1

Submission Number: 6216