Humanoids hold great potential for service, industrial, and rescue applications, in which robots must sustain whole-body stability while performing intense, contact-rich interactions with the environment. However, enabling humanoids to generate human-like, adaptive responses under such conditions remains a major challenge. To address this, we propose Thor, a humanoid framework for human-level whole-body reactions in contact-rich environments. Based on the robot’s force analysis, we design a force-adaptive torso-tilt (FAT2) reward function to encourage humanoids to exhibit human-like responses during force-interaction tasks. To mitigate the high-dimensional challenges of humanoid control, Thor introduces a reinforcement learning architecture that decouples the upper body, waist, and lower body. Each component shares global observations of the whole body and jointly updates its parameters. Finally, we deploy Thor on the Unitree G1, and it substantially outperforms baselines in force-interaction tasks. Specifically, the robot achieves a peak pulling force of 167.7 ± 2.4 N (approximately 48% of the G1’s body weight) when moving backward and 145.5 ± 2.0 N when moving forward, representing improvements of 68.9% and 74.7%, respectively, compared with the best-performing baseline. Moreover, Thor is capable of pulling a loaded rack (130 N) and opening a fire door with one hand (60 N). These results highlight Thor’s effectiveness in enhancing humanoid force-interaction capabilities.
Demonstrates Thor’s whole-body coordination, stability, and balance control while performing a high-force pulling task.
Thor exp. 1
Thor exp. 2
Thor exp. 3 (failure)
Baseline (failure)
Showcases Thor’s ability to perform single-arm, unbalanced contact interactions with a rigid environment, highlighting its force-interaction and manipulation capabilities in contact-rich tasks.
Highlights Thor’s skill in dragging moderate-mass objects while maintaining coordinated upper- and lower-body dynamics and full-body stability in complex force-interaction scenarios.
Thor forward
Baseline forward
Thor backward
Baseline forward
Illustrates Thor’s precise manipulation and steering of a heavy wheelchair under strong physical interactions, demonstrating accurate command following and robust whole-body control.
Thor make a turn
Thor backward
Demonstrates Thor’s ability to perform fine upper-body, contact-rich tasks under unbalanced force conditions. Despite the lack of external force sensing and fine force control—resulting in significant contact forces and impacts—Thor is still able to successfully complete the task.
Thor
Baseline
@misc{li2025thorhumanlevelwholebodyreactions,
title = {Thor: Towards Human-Level Whole-Body Reactions under Intense Contact-Rich Environments},
author = {Gangyang Li and Qing Shi and Youhao Hu and Jincheng Hu and Zhongyuan Wang and Xinlong Wang and Shaqi Luo},
year = {2025},
eprint = {2510.26280},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
primaryClass = {cs.RO},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.26280}
}
We are looking for passionate and self-motivated students to join us!
Our research focuses on Whole-Body Control (WBC) and Vision-Language-Action (VLA).
Internship and research collaboration opportunities are available.
📬 Send your resume to: luoshaqi@163.com