Precise SE(3) End-Effector Tracking in Whole-Body Humanoid Control

Precise end-effector tracking during humanoid whole-body motion is challenging due to floating-base oscillations, gravity, dynamic coupling, and locomotion-induced disturbances. We propose ResGAC, a whole-body humanoid controller for precise end-effector pose tracking that combines geometric admittance control (GAC) with residual reinforcement learning. GAC provides structured task-space feedback and generates nominal arm joint-position targets, while residual RL compensates for unmodeled dynamics and coordinates locomotion and balance in the shared joint-position action space. The left-invariant geometric formulation allows the same GAC law to be used across manipulation reference frames. This enables the use of a ground-attached heading frame that preserves planar locomotion while removing pelvis roll, pitch, and heave from the manipulation reference, thereby reducing reference-induced end-effector motion during locomotion. ResGAC is validated on a real Unitree G1 humanoid. Across four standing end-effector tracking benchmarks, ResGAC consistently outperforms representative baselines, including SONIC, achieving lower translational and rotational errors. Real-world experiments further demonstrate reduced propagation of pelvis motion to the desired end-effector pose using the proposed ground-attached heading frame. ResGAC achieves 90% success in a standing peg-in-hole task compared with 50% for SONIC, and accurate world-frame end-effector pose tracking during lower-body motion. Experimental videos are included in the supplementary material and are also available on the project website: https://resgac.github.io/ResGAC-website/.