Humanoid SRL: Augmenting Humanoids with Supernumerary Limbs for Coordinated Loco-Manipulation

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Humanoid robots are envisioned to perform diverse human-level tasks through their anthropomorphic morphology. Their dual-arm configuration enables a broad range of everyday actions. Yet, as in humans, this morphology can constrain loco-manipulation when both arms are occupied or additional contacts are required beyond their reach. Supernumerary robotic limbs (SRLs) offer a way to extend these capabilities, but their integration requires the added limb to be coordinated with whole-body motion and balance. In this study, we develop and integrate a supernumerary arm into a humanoid platform to investigate how morphological augmentation reshapes its feasible action space. Through quantitative analysis and hardware experiments across two configurations, we show how the additional limb expands whole-body interaction capabilities by enabling manipulation and support to be coordinated beyond the constraints of the native dual-arm configuration. To control this augmented morphology, we leverage model-based trajectory optimization (TO) to generate dynamically feasible motions for goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (RL) controllers. The controllers are trained in simulation and transferred to hardware in a zero-shot manner, enabling coordinated whole-body skills for contact-rich tri-arm loco-manipulation. We further show vision-guided autonomous execution on selected tasks using diffusion policies trained from hardware demonstrations. Our findings suggest that humanoid morphology need not be restricted to human-like forms, but can be reimagined as an extensible design space for robotic augmentation.

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