Learning Multi-Humanoid Pickup and Transport via Decentralized Object-Centric Control
Bikram Pandit, Mohitvishnu S. Gadde, Aayam Kumar Shrestha, Alan Fern
Abstract
We study cooperative multi-humanoid pickup and transport of objects with varying size, weight, and geometry, requiring robot teams of different sizes. Our approach uses decentralized object-centric control, where each humanoid is assigned a local attachment region on the shared object and learns to realize pickup and transport through gripperless bimanual pinching. This attachment-based interface provides a common control abstraction spanning single-robot pickup, cooperative multi-robot transport, and robot-to-robot handover, without per-task redesign. We find that policies trained only on single-robot pickup already transfer nontrivially to cooperative settings, suggesting that this abstraction captures much of the structure needed for coordination. At the same time, explicit multi-robot training further improves performance, showing that shared-object coupling introduces coordination dynamics that are beneficial to learn directly. We validate the approach in simulation across varying team sizes and object geometries, and demonstrate sim-to-real transfer on hardware, where the learned controllers enable real humanoids to perform cooperative manipulation tasks.