Unified Motion Retargeting for Humanoids with Learned Point Cloud Correspondence

Hanyang Cao1,2,* Yuetong Fang1,2,* Taesoo Kwon3,* Runyi Yu2,4 Ji Ma5 Jing Tan1,2
Yangchen Zhou1 Baoze Du2 Yi Gu1 Yukang Gao1,2 Ruoli Dai2 Lei Han2,† Renjing Xu1,†
1HKUST(GZ) 2Noitom Robotics 3Hanyang University 4HKUST 5HKU
*Equal contribution Corresponding authors

Abstract

Humanoid learning increasingly relies on transforming vast and diverse human motion data into high-quality robot reference trajectories. However, retargeting human motion to humanoid robots is challenging due to substantial differences in morphology, degrees of freedom, joint ranges, and kinematic constraints between humans and robots. Existing retargeting methods typically address these differences by defining human-robot correspondence through hand-crafted sparse keypoints or body-part pairs. As a result, retargeting quality depends heavily on manual semantic design, limiting scalability across motion sources and robot morphologies and providing only sparse guidance for reproducing detailed poses and interactions. In this paper, we present Unified Motion Retargeting (UMR), a framework that learns dense point cloud correspondence without requiring manually designed human-robot mappings. By treating exterior point clouds as a unified interface between human motion and humanoid robots, UMR decouples retargeting from source-specific skeletal semantics and robot-specific topology. The learned dense correspondence provides fine-grained geometric anchors for constrained point cloud matching optimization, enabling surface-level pose alignment and direct transfer of interaction contacts. Experiments demonstrate that UMR unifies retargeting across heterogeneous motion sources, robot embodiments, and downstream scenarios ranging from locomotion to interaction, while achieving higher motion fidelity and plausibility than state-of-the-art methods. UMR therefore provides a scalable foundation for transforming large-scale human motion references into robot-ready training data.

Overview

UMR learns ordered human–robot point cloud correspondence in canonical poses and binds paired points to the body meshes. It then solves constrained retargeting over these points, matching body pose while transferring point cloud contact maps from human motion to the robot.
UMR overview

Unified Retargeting Across Sources and Embodiments

The same point cloud correspondence and correspondence-guided retargeting formulation supports heterogeneous motion representations and diverse robot morphologies without manually defined skeletal keypoints or human–robot body mappings.
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UMR Robot Retargeting Studio

Bring a new humanoid to motion with a simple drag-and-play workflow. Drop in its assets, shape the T-pose, choose a reference, and let UMR carry the motion across embodiments. Every result below was produced directly in the Studio through the same workflow, without robot-specific mappings or per-robot parameter tuning. Ready to try it? Launch the Studio to retarget your own robot!
PiPlus
Adam
Fourier N1
Interactive browser application

Open the UMR Motion Retargeting Studio

Launch Studio

Comparison with Baselines

Locomotion

Both results use the same motion from BONES-SEED: kneeling_start_R_001__A409

SOMA Proportional+UMR
SOMA Uniform + GMR
Robot-Object Interaction

Motions from OmniContact

Push Box
Relocate Ball
Robot-Scene Interaction

Motions from GRAIL

Chair Sitting
Walking on Stairs

Deployment in Real World

The demonstrations below show policies trained from reference motions retargeted by UMR and deployed to perform a range of real-world tasks. The reference data comes from MimicKit, GRAIL, and OmniContact, with policy training powered by the BeyondMimic, Holosoma, and OmniContact pipelines.

Spin Kick (MimicKit)

Walking on Stairs (GRAIL)

Chair Sitting (GRAIL)

Ball Carrying While Walking Backward (OmniContact)

Box Relocation (OmniContact)