Humanoid Locomotion and Manipulation: Current Progress and Challenges in Control, Planning, and Learning

Humanoid robots hold great potential to perform various human-level skills, involving unified locomotion and manipulation in real-world settings. Driven by advances in machine learning and the strength of existing model-based approaches, these capabilities have progressed rapidly, but often separately. This survey offers a comprehensive overview of the state-of-the-art in humanoid locomotion and manipulation, with a focus on control, planning, and learning methods. We first review the model-based methods that have been the backbone of humanoid robotics for the past three decades. We discuss contact planning, motion planning, and whole-body control, highlighting the tradeoffs between model fidelity and computational efficiency. Then, the focus is shifted to examine emerging learning-based methods, with an emphasis on reinforcement and imitation learning that enhance the robustness and versatility of loco-manipulation skills. Furthermore, we assess the potential of integrating foundation models with humanoid embodiments to enable the development of generalist humanoid agents. This survey also highlights the emerging role of tactile sensing, particularly whole-body tactile feedback, as a crucial modality for handling contact-rich interactions. Finally, we compare the strengths and limitations of model-based and learning-based paradigms from multiple perspectives, such as robustness, computational efficiency, versatility, and generalizability, and suggest potential solutions to existing challenges.