HANDOFF

HANDOFF: Unified humanoid whole-body controller distilled from complementary specialist teachers

HANDOFF is a single whole-body controller for humanoid robots that uses a compact, explicit command-space interface bridging task planning and motor control. It is trained via multi-teacher KL distillation into a mixture-of-experts student from three specialists: whole-body motion tracking, locomotion, and fall-recovery. Evaluated on the Unitree G1, it matches state-of-the-art velocity tracking and demonstrates natural-language-driven task execution via a VLM-based agentic planner without task-specific fine-tuning. The work is relevant to the AI/robotics intersection as it shows a practical path to deploying language-driven agentic planners on physical humanoid hardware.