Chasing Autonomy: Dynamic Retargeting and Control Guided RL for Performant and Controllable Humanoid Running
This work addresses the challenge of autonomous and controllable locomotion for humanoid robots, representing an incremental improvement over existing methods.
The paper tackled the problem of enabling humanoid robots to perform dynamic, long-duration running by developing a reinforcement learning pipeline that dynamically retargets human motions and uses control-guided rewards, resulting in running speeds up to 3.3 m/s and traversing hundreds of meters in real-world environments.
Humanoid robots have the promise of locomoting like humans, including fast and dynamic running. Recently, reinforcement learning (RL) controllers that can mimic human motions have become popular as they can generate very dynamic behaviors, but they are often restricted to single motion play-back which hinders their deployment in long duration and autonomous locomotion. In this paper, we present a pipeline to dynamically retarget human motions through an optimization routine with hard constraints to generate improved periodic reference libraries from a single human demonstration. We then study the effect of both the reference motion and the reward structure on the reference and commanded velocity tracking, concluding that a goal-conditioned and control-guided reward which tracks dynamically optimized human data results in the best performance. We deploy the policy on hardware, demonstrating its speed and endurance by achieving running speeds of up to 3.3 m/s on a Unitree G1 robot and traversing hundreds of meters in real-world environments. Additionally, to demonstrate the controllability of the locomotion, we use the controller in a full perception and planning autonomy stack for obstacle avoidance while running outdoors.