Whole-Body Control

Computes commands for all of a humanoid's or legged robot's joints together, so several tasks are accomplished at once.

Whole-body control means computing commands for every joint of a floating-base robot (one whose body isn't fixed to the ground, such as a humanoid or quadruped) together, rather than controlling the legs and arms separately. The classic framework comes from a 2005 paper by Sentis and Khatib: things like the center of mass, hands, feet, joint limits, and contacts are written as “tasks” or constraints and given priorities — higher-priority tasks (such as staying within joint limits or not falling) must be satisfied, while lower-priority ones use whatever redundant freedom remains to do as well as possible; in practice this is usually formulated as a quadratic program (QP) or a hierarchy of QPs, solved every control cycle. It matters because reaching out with one hand shifts a humanoid's center of mass, so the legs and torso have to compensate at the same time. Learned whole-body control took off around 2024 — HOVER (ICRA 2025), for example, uses a single neural-network policy to unify navigation, mobile manipulation, and tabletop manipulation, among other control modes. A higher-level VLA or a teleoperator supplies the goal, and WBC turns it into whole-body joint commands.

ExampleA humanoid bends down to pick up a box with one hand: WBC simultaneously satisfies “hand reaches the box,” “center-of-mass projection stays within the foot-support region,” and “joints stay within limits,” so it automatically bends at the waist and knees while swinging the other arm back for counterweight.

Also called

WBC, Whole-Body Controller

Related

Learning-Based Whole-Body Control · Task Prioritization · Hierarchical Quadratic Programming · Null-Space Control · Operational Space Control · HOVER

Sources

Sentis & Khatib, Synthesis of Whole-Body Behaviors through Hierarchical Control of Behavioral Primitives (IJHR 2005)
HOVER: Versatile Neural Whole-Body Controller for Humanoid Robots (arXiv 2410.21229)
A Survey of Behavior Foundation Model: Next-Generation Whole-Body Control System of Humanoid Robots (arXiv 2506.20487)

As of

2025-03