PhysReaction: Physically Plausible Real-Time Humanoid Reaction Synthesis via Forward Dynamics Guided 4D Imitation
This work addresses the challenge of creating interactive and empathetic robots for human environments, representing a strong specific gain in robotics.
The paper tackles the problem of generating physically plausible real-time humanoid reactions by proposing a Forward Dynamics Guided 4D Imitation method, which improves reaction speed by 33 times and enhances quality compared to existing methods.
Humanoid Reaction Synthesis is pivotal for creating highly interactive and empathetic robots that can seamlessly integrate into human environments, enhancing the way we live, work, and communicate. However, it is difficult to learn the diverse interaction patterns of multiple humans and generate physically plausible reactions. The kinematics-based approaches face challenges, including issues like floating feet, sliding, penetration, and other problems that defy physical plausibility. The existing physics-based method often relies on kinematics-based methods to generate reference states, which struggle with the challenges posed by kinematic noise during action execution. Constrained by their reliance on diffusion models, these methods are unable to achieve real-time inference. In this work, we propose a Forward Dynamics Guided 4D Imitation method to generate physically plausible human-like reactions. The learned policy is capable of generating physically plausible and human-like reactions in real-time, significantly improving the speed(x33) and quality of reactions compared with the existing method. Our experiments on the InterHuman and Chi3D datasets, along with ablation studies, demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.