Deep Whole-body Parkour
This work addresses the challenge of combining perceptive locomotion and general motion tracking for humanoid robots, representing an incremental advancement in robotics control.
The paper tackles the problem of enabling humanoid robots to perform dynamic, non-locomotion tasks like vaulting and dive-rolling on uneven terrain by integrating exteroceptive sensing into whole-body motion tracking, resulting in robust multi-contact motions that significantly expand traversability beyond simple gaits.
Current approaches to humanoid control generally fall into two paradigms: perceptive locomotion, which handles terrain well but is limited to pedal gaits, and general motion tracking, which reproduces complex skills but ignores environmental capabilities. This work unites these paradigms to achieve perceptive general motion control. We present a framework where exteroceptive sensing is integrated into whole-body motion tracking, permitting a humanoid to perform highly dynamic, non-locomotion tasks on uneven terrain. By training a single policy to perform multiple distinct motions across varied terrestrial features, we demonstrate the non-trivial benefit of integrating perception into the control loop. Our results show that this framework enables robust, highly dynamic multi-contact motions, such as vaulting and dive-rolling, on unstructured terrain, significantly expanding the robot's traversability beyond simple walking or running. https://project-instinct.github.io/deep-whole-body-parkour