Walk Like Dogs: Learning Steerable Imitation Controllers for Legged Robots from Unlabeled Motion Data

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Kang, Dongho, Cheng, Jin, Zargarbashi, Fatemeh, Yoon, Taerim, Choi, Sungjoon, Coros, Stelian
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Kang, Dongho
Cheng, Jin
Zargarbashi, Fatemeh
Yoon, Taerim
Choi, Sungjoon
Coros, Stelian
author_facet Kang, Dongho
Cheng, Jin
Zargarbashi, Fatemeh
Yoon, Taerim
Choi, Sungjoon
Coros, Stelian
contents We present an imitation learning framework that extracts distinctive legged locomotion behaviors and transitions between them from unlabeled real-world motion data. By automatically discovering behavioral modes and mapping user steering commands to them, the framework enables user-steerable and stylistically consistent motion imitation. Our approach first bridges the morphological and physical gap between the motion source and the robot by transforming raw data into a physically consistent, robot-compatible dataset using a kino-dynamic motion retargeting strategy. This data is used to train a steerable motion synthesis module that generates stylistic, multi-modal kinematic targets from high-level user commands. These targets serve as a reference for a reinforcement learning controller, which reliably executes them on the robot hardware. In our experiments, a controller trained on dog motion data demonstrated distinctive quadrupedal gait patterns and emergent gait transitions in response to varying velocity commands. These behaviors were achieved without manual labeling, predefined mode counts, or explicit switching rules, maintaining the stylistic coherence of the data.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_00677
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Walk Like Dogs: Learning Steerable Imitation Controllers for Legged Robots from Unlabeled Motion Data
Kang, Dongho
Cheng, Jin
Zargarbashi, Fatemeh
Yoon, Taerim
Choi, Sungjoon
Coros, Stelian
Robotics
We present an imitation learning framework that extracts distinctive legged locomotion behaviors and transitions between them from unlabeled real-world motion data. By automatically discovering behavioral modes and mapping user steering commands to them, the framework enables user-steerable and stylistically consistent motion imitation. Our approach first bridges the morphological and physical gap between the motion source and the robot by transforming raw data into a physically consistent, robot-compatible dataset using a kino-dynamic motion retargeting strategy. This data is used to train a steerable motion synthesis module that generates stylistic, multi-modal kinematic targets from high-level user commands. These targets serve as a reference for a reinforcement learning controller, which reliably executes them on the robot hardware. In our experiments, a controller trained on dog motion data demonstrated distinctive quadrupedal gait patterns and emergent gait transitions in response to varying velocity commands. These behaviors were achieved without manual labeling, predefined mode counts, or explicit switching rules, maintaining the stylistic coherence of the data.
title Walk Like Dogs: Learning Steerable Imitation Controllers for Legged Robots from Unlabeled Motion Data
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.00677