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Main Authors: Hu, Kaizhe, Shi, Haochen, He, Yao, Wang, Weizhuo, Liu, C. Karen, Song, Shuran
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12252
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author Hu, Kaizhe
Shi, Haochen
He, Yao
Wang, Weizhuo
Liu, C. Karen
Song, Shuran
author_facet Hu, Kaizhe
Shi, Haochen
He, Yao
Wang, Weizhuo
Liu, C. Karen
Song, Shuran
contents Simulation-based reinforcement learning (RL) has significantly advanced humanoid locomotion tasks, yet direct real-world RL from scratch or adapting from pretrained policies remains rare, limiting the full potential of humanoid robots. Real-world learning, despite being crucial for overcoming the sim-to-real gap, faces substantial challenges related to safety, reward design, and learning efficiency. To address these limitations, we propose Robot-Trains-Robot (RTR), a novel framework where a robotic arm teacher actively supports and guides a humanoid robot student. The RTR system provides protection, learning schedule, reward, perturbation, failure detection, and automatic resets. It enables efficient long-term real-world humanoid training with minimal human intervention. Furthermore, we propose a novel RL pipeline that facilitates and stabilizes sim-to-real transfer by optimizing a single dynamics-encoded latent variable in the real world. We validate our method through two challenging real-world humanoid tasks: fine-tuning a walking policy for precise speed tracking and learning a humanoid swing-up task from scratch, illustrating the promising capabilities of real-world humanoid learning realized by RTR-style systems. See https://robot-trains-robot.github.io/ for more info.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_12252
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Robot Trains Robot: Automatic Real-World Policy Adaptation and Learning for Humanoids
Hu, Kaizhe
Shi, Haochen
He, Yao
Wang, Weizhuo
Liu, C. Karen
Song, Shuran
Robotics
Simulation-based reinforcement learning (RL) has significantly advanced humanoid locomotion tasks, yet direct real-world RL from scratch or adapting from pretrained policies remains rare, limiting the full potential of humanoid robots. Real-world learning, despite being crucial for overcoming the sim-to-real gap, faces substantial challenges related to safety, reward design, and learning efficiency. To address these limitations, we propose Robot-Trains-Robot (RTR), a novel framework where a robotic arm teacher actively supports and guides a humanoid robot student. The RTR system provides protection, learning schedule, reward, perturbation, failure detection, and automatic resets. It enables efficient long-term real-world humanoid training with minimal human intervention. Furthermore, we propose a novel RL pipeline that facilitates and stabilizes sim-to-real transfer by optimizing a single dynamics-encoded latent variable in the real world. We validate our method through two challenging real-world humanoid tasks: fine-tuning a walking policy for precise speed tracking and learning a humanoid swing-up task from scratch, illustrating the promising capabilities of real-world humanoid learning realized by RTR-style systems. See https://robot-trains-robot.github.io/ for more info.
title Robot Trains Robot: Automatic Real-World Policy Adaptation and Learning for Humanoids
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12252