Humanoid Robots Learn to Pull Rickshaws: Whole-Body Control Under Coupled Wheeled Loads
ChongZzZhang · x · 2026-10-06
Researchers at Legged AI Lab (Shanghai Innovation Institute) present a paper on humanoid rickshaw pulling, letting a Unitree G1 haul payloads far heavier than itself by pulling a passive wheeled vehicle.
- Core challenge: maintaining persistent upper-body contact and stable grasps while adapting to unknown, configuration-dependent coupled forces from payload, vehicle and terrain
- Method: a privileged teacher (seeing vehicle states, interaction forces, load properties) is distilled into a history-conditioned student that implicitly infers coupled dynamics from proprioception, followed by RL fine-tuning
- Results: accurate vehicle tracking with reduced oscillation, torso tilt and actuation cost vs. No-History/Only-History baselines; gait-synchronized whole-body reactions stabilize lateral and roll motion
Video available on YouTube.
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