Abstract
Learning from human videos offers a promising route to acquiring diverse manipulation skills. Extending this capability beyond tabletop settings to long-horizon mobile manipulation requires adapting and composing demonstrated interactions across changing scenes and robot configurations. We present Skill Assembly and Kinematic Imitation (SAKI), a framework connecting human-video skill acquisition, cross-demonstration assembly and closed-loop whole-body execution. SAKI prepares reusable object-centric skills that preserve task-critical interactions while allowing transfer paths to adapt. Given a goal and supplied task dependencies, it selects and orders skills, binds their object roles to the current scene, and carries scene estimates and robot configuration between successive skills. Whole-body kinematic imitation generates coordinated base, arm and gripper motion. During execution, persistent object estimates maintain task references across viewpoint changes, while visual feedback updates remaining trajectories. Real-robot experiments demonstrate skill reuse across layouts and the composition of independently demonstrated interactions into continuous mobile tasks, including tidying and wiping. Ablation results show that task-conditioned reference preparation substantially improves long-horizon task completion with whole-body optimisation and visual feedback held fixed. Check https://aus.bot/research/saki/ for video demos!
Keywords
Subject
Publication details
- Journal
- Not available
- Open access
- Green open access
Cite this article
APA 7
Lu, Y., Zhao, J., & Zhi, W. (2026). SAKI: Skill Assembly and Kinematic Imitation from Human Videos for Long-Horizon Mobile Manipulation. https://omanscience.com/en/articles/saki-skill-assembly-and-kinematic-imitation-from-human-videos-for-long-horizon-mobile-manipulation
MLA 9
Lu, Yijie, et al. "SAKI: Skill Assembly and Kinematic Imitation from Human Videos for Long-Horizon Mobile Manipulation." https://omanscience.com/en/articles/saki-skill-assembly-and-kinematic-imitation-from-human-videos-for-long-horizon-mobile-manipulation.
Chicago (author–date)
Lu, Yijie, James Zhao, and Weiming Zhi. 2026. "SAKI: Skill Assembly and Kinematic Imitation from Human Videos for Long-Horizon Mobile Manipulation." https://omanscience.com/en/articles/saki-skill-assembly-and-kinematic-imitation-from-human-videos-for-long-horizon-mobile-manipulation.
Harvard
Lu, Y., Zhao, J. and Zhi, W. (2026) 'SAKI: Skill Assembly and Kinematic Imitation from Human Videos for Long-Horizon Mobile Manipulation', Available at: https://omanscience.com/en/articles/saki-skill-assembly-and-kinematic-imitation-from-human-videos-for-long-horizon-mobile-manipulation.
Vancouver
Lu Y, Zhao J, Zhi W. SAKI: Skill Assembly and Kinematic Imitation from Human Videos for Long-Horizon Mobile Manipulation. https://omanscience.com/en/articles/saki-skill-assembly-and-kinematic-imitation-from-human-videos-for-long-horizon-mobile-manipulation
IEEE
Y. Lu, J. Zhao, and W. Zhi, "SAKI: Skill Assembly and Kinematic Imitation from Human Videos for Long-Horizon Mobile Manipulation," https://omanscience.com/en/articles/saki-skill-assembly-and-kinematic-imitation-from-human-videos-for-long-horizon-mobile-manipulation.