We compare the real-world performance of FALCON with a baseline that uses RL for low-body locomotion and IK for upper-body manipulation w/o any force curriculum, on the following three tasks: Door-Opening, Cart-Pulling, and Heavy-Lifting.
Humanoid loco-manipulation holds transformative potential for daily service and industrial tasks, yet achieving precise, robust whole-body control with 3D end-effector force interaction remains a major challenge. Prior approaches are often limited to lightweight tasks or quadrupedal/wheeled platforms. To overcome these limitations, we propose FALCON, a dual-agent reinforcement-learning-based framework for robust force-adaptive humanoid loco-manipulation. FALCON decomposes whole-body control into two specialized agents: (1) a lower-body agent ensuring stable locomotion under external force disturbances, and (2) an upper-body agent precisely tracking end-effector positions with implicit adaptive force compensation. These two agents are jointly trained in simulation with a force curriculum that progressively escalates the magnitude of external force exerted on the end effector while respecting torque limits. Experiments demonstrate that, compared to the baselines, FALCON achieves 2$\times$ more accurate upper-body joint tracking, while maintaining robust locomotion under force disturbances and achieving faster training convergence. Moreover, FALCON enables policy training without embodiment-specific reward or curriculum tuning. Using the same training setup, we obtain policies that are deployed across multiple humanoids, enabling forceful loco-manipulation tasks such as transporting payloads (0-20N force), cart-pulling (0-100N), and door-opening (0-40N) in the real world.
FALCON is a dual-agent reinforcement learning framework that decouples locomotion and manipulation with separate rewards for efficient training. During learning, a torque-limit-aware 3D force curriculum applies progressively stronger external forces to the end-effectors, maximizing force adaptivity while ensuring safety. FALCON can be seamlessly trained and deployed on different humanoid robots without embodiment-specific reward or curriculum tuning, showing its cross-platform generalization capability.
@article{zhang2025falcon,
title={FALCON: Learning Force-Adaptive Humanoid Loco-Manipulation},
author={Zhang, Yuanhang and Yuan, Yifu and Gurunath, Prajwal and He, Tairan and Omidshafiei, Shayegan and Agha-mohammadi, Ali-akbar and Vazquez-Chanlatte, Marcell and Pedersen, Liam and Shi, Guanya},
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.06776},
year={2025}
}