Glossary · Control
Whole-body control
Also known as: WBC
In brief
Whole-body control is a control approach that treats every joint of the robot as part of one optimization problem, balancing many objectives at once: track a hand goal, keep the feet planted, stay balanced, respect torque limits. The output is a coordinated set of joint commands across the entire body.
Older control approaches split the robot into a balance controller (legs) and a manipulation controller (arms) that run on separate priorities. Whole-body control unifies them: the controller knows that swinging the arms shifts the center of mass, that lifting a heavy load changes the foot torque profile, and that all of this has to satisfy the same balance constraint simultaneously.
Most of the leading 2026 humanoid platforms use either explicit whole-body QP-based controllers or learned policies that produce whole-body coordinated motion implicitly. The advantage shows up in tasks that need both manipulation and locomotion at the same time.
Related terms
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Glossary entries are upstream. The catalog is where the implementations live.