Some notes on loco-manipulation and its data recipe. Helix 2.5 is the first launch of Loco-manipulation these days. Not only uppper-body. So the question is not whether the robot can move and grasp, it is whether it can autonomously decide how to move to better conduct manipulation tasks. Loco-manipulation is hard because the WBC movement is based on the intent of mani. The policy for locomotion should be integrated with mani, then deal with more action space / DoF. The WBC and mani policies will affect each other as well. Imagine you are pushing the drawer when the force on your hand affects your balance or you lean forward to place the force. This process is dynamics so active perception is required. Personally I am curious about the data recipe of Helix 2.5. The blog highlighted that it's pretrained on Index, which looks like stereo data only. But it didn't mention how is the WBC supervision is built. Some previous work covers this as well, like EgoWholeMocap and ZeroWBC. GenRobot published a blog about the pipeline from ego to WBC (the picture below). It adopts vision-only ground-truth capture system and synchronizes an Ego headset with third-person cameras observing the same behavior.