Scalable Multi-Human Cooperative Manipulation via Commander-Executor Coordination

Abstract

Multi-human cooperative object manipulation is a highly challenging topic in humanoid control. While existing methods can handle simple collaborative carrying tasks, they struggle with role-dependent, long-horizon, and sequential cooperative manipulation. To address this issue, we propose a hierarchical commander-executor framework that enables multiple agents to accomplish complex collaborative tasks in distinct ways. Specifically, a commander combines instructions and scene information for joint semantic and geometric planning. It then decomposes the task into role-specific subtasks and generates shared object-centric coordination plans, specifying execution timing, target positions, and manipulation actions for each agent. Conditioned on the commander's high-level strategy and each agent's local observations, the executor learns a low-level physics-based policy through a solo-to-cooperative curriculum to realize coordinated human-object interactions. The planned object trajectory provides a shared coordination target, while root positions and grasping instructions specify role-dependent execution cues. We evaluate our method on a variety of object manipulation tasks, demonstrating its ability to execute long-horizon tasks that combine different types of collaboration and to scale from two-agent to multi-agent cooperation. Extensive experiments further show that our approach achieves higher success rates compared to state-of-the-art methods. Code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/TJU-3DV/Co-Manipulation.