Whole-body Humanoid Robot Locomotion with Human Reference

  • Qiang Zhang*
    MICS Thrust, HKUST(GZ)
       
  • Peter Cui*
    PNDbotics
       
  • David Yan
    PNDbotics
       
  • Jingkai Sun
    MICS Thrust, HKUST(GZ)
       
  • Yiqun Duan
    AI Centre, UTS
       
  • Arthur Zhang
    PNDbotics
       
  • Renjing Xu
    MICS Thrust, HKUST(GZ)
       

Abstract

Recently, humanoid robots have made significant advances in their ability to perform challenging tasks due to the deployment of Reinforcement Learning (RL), however, the inherent complexity of humanoid robots, including the difficulty of designing complicated reward functions and training entire sophisticated systems, still poses a notable challenge. To conquer these challenges, after many iterations and in-depth investigations, we have meticulously developed a full-size humanoid robot, "Adam", whose innovative structural design greatly improves the efficiency and effectiveness of the imitation learning process. In addition, we have developed a novel imitation learning framework based on an adversarial motion prior, which applies not only to Adam but also to humanoid robots in general. Using the framework, Adam can exhibit unprecedented human-like characteristics in locomotion tasks. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework enables Adam to achieve human-comparable performance in complex locomotion tasks, marking the first time that human locomotion data has been used for imitation learning in a full-size humanoid robot.

Results

The top image displays the humanoid robot Adam walking on unseen terrain, and the bottom image shows Adam moving from a standing position to running.

vis_res

The results of the whole-body humanoid robot locomotion. (A)(B) demonstrate the robot's robust locomotion performance under external disturbances. Especially, it demonstrated the characteristic of "straight-knee" (C)(D) show the human-like swinging of the upper limbs. (E)(F) displays the robustness and human-likeness on unknown and complex terrains. (G)(H) present for the first time the humanoid robot's "heel-to-toe" running and walking gaits.

vis_res

BibTeX 

             
@article{zhang2024whole,
  title={Whole-body Humanoid Robot Locomotion with Human Reference},
  author={Zhang, Qiang and Cui, Peter and Yan, David and Sun, Jingkai and Duan, Yiqun and Zhang, Arthur and Xu, Renjing},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.18294},
  year={2024}
}