Bionic Human-Motion Style Transfer for Physically Executable Whole-Body Control of Humanoid Robots

Abstract: Expressive whole-body motion is important for humanoid robots operating in human environments, where robots are expected to move stably while presenting readable and adjustable body behaviors. However, most expressive motions are still obtained from fixed demonstrations or manually designed scripts, making it difficult to reuse a demonstrated style across different motion contents. Inspired by the way human motion styles convey affective and intentional cues through gait rhythm, posture, arm swing and body sway, this paper proposes a bionic generation-to-control framework for exemplar-driven style transfer on humanoid robots. Given a short human style exemplar and a target content motion, the proposed framework generates a stylized whole-body reference that preserves the intended motion content while transferring the demonstrated style. A physics-aware multi-condition latent diffusion model is developed to fuse style, content and trajectory conditions, and classifier-free guidance is used to adjust the style intensity without retraining. To improve hardware executability, contact-consistency and temporal-smoothness regularization are imposed on decoded motions during training. The generated references are then converted into G1-compatible robot references and executed by a preview-based whole-body tracking policy trained with a cluster-and-distill strategy. Simulation and Unitree G1 experiments show that the proposed method can transfer short human style exemplars to diverse robot motion contents, reduce contact and jitter artifacts compared with animation-oriented style-transfer baselines, and achieve a 96.0% success rate over 125 reported real-robot trials. The results demonstrate the feasibility of using short human motion exemplars as reusable bionic sources for physically executable expressive humanoid motion.