🤖Introducing TWIST: Teleoperated Whole-Body Imitation System. We develop a humanoid teleoperation system to enable coordinated, versatile, whole-body movements, using a single neural network. This is our first step toward general-purpose robots. 🌐

TWIST is a whole-body teleoperation system with extreme whole-body reachability, powered by MoCap and a single NN controller.

Different from recent teleoperation systems that tackle this problem as separate control for lower-body and upper-body, we aim to tackle this problem with "whole-body human imitation" directly. No separate control. Better coordination. More human-like.

We find that accurate, real-time, whole-body tracking unlocks human-like skills — far beyond controlling just arms or hands. Below: Our robot lifts a very long box with the human together, while kicking the door to remove the obstacle. Just like how we humans handle this.

Here are more skills I want to show with TWIST, that are never present in previous works. Our robot deeply crouches down, uprights the garbage can with two hands, and closes the door.

Humans kick the door open with their feet, when holding too many things with their arms and hands. Humanoid robots now can do this too.

Imagine in the kitchen, how you side-step to fetch something on your right hand side. Similarly, our robot can perform these locomotion skills: side-stepping, backward walking...

And when you are sad and upset, why not let a humanoid robot bring you some comfort? Our robot transports a cute "Minions" from the table to the human. This shows long-horizon loco-manipulation.

shows some boxing skills already. But what if we want humanoid robots to move and box just like us? Each movement is not scripted, but a response against the opponent. --> Then we need TWIST

This dancing demo is inspired by Exbody2. Differently, this is a real-time control, meaning that you can do whatever dancing steps you want.

Here is one experimental thing we tried: Tiptoing. Though the robot is not balancing with only one foot entirely, it can balance for a very short time.

We have shown our robot transports a "Minions" with two arms. But humans actually transport things with every body part they have. Why not the same for humanoid robots?

A question that has been asked for long for humanoids is "when can we really pick things up from the ground?" Our robot can lift the box that is placed on the ground.

An impressive thing to me is that our robot can kick the football very dynamically. This is a very powerful kick, seen from the distance and the height the football reaches. Again, this is not just a scripted motion; but a single controller that has been used for all other task.

Something not told by most humanoid papers is g1 is very easily being overheated. Enjoy these heart-broken failures...

Thank you all for watching! by our robot powered by TWIST

This project will not be possible without our brilliant team. @ZeYanjie (me), Zixuan @C___eric417 and Jason @xbpeng4 (experts in physics-based character animation), João (expert in human motion and retargeting) , Zi-ang @ziang_cao (all the demo shooting and real world experiments, so many efforts), and my supportive advisors, Jiajun @jiajunwu_cs and Karen. Thank you everyone. It is my honor to work with all these brilliant souls.

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