Multi-Domain Motion Embedding: Expressive Real-Time Mimicry for Legged Robots

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Heyrman, Matthias, Li, Chenhao, Klemm, Victor, Kang, Dongho, Coros, Stelian, Hutter, Marco
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Heyrman, Matthias
Li, Chenhao
Klemm, Victor
Kang, Dongho
Coros, Stelian
Hutter, Marco
author_facet Heyrman, Matthias
Li, Chenhao
Klemm, Victor
Kang, Dongho
Coros, Stelian
Hutter, Marco
contents Effective motion representation is crucial for enabling robots to imitate expressive behaviors in real time, yet existing motion controllers often ignore inherent patterns in motion. Previous efforts in representation learning do not attempt to jointly capture structured periodic patterns and irregular variations in human and animal movement. To address this, we present Multi-Domain Motion Embedding (MDME), a motion representation that unifies the embedding of structured and unstructured features using a wavelet-based encoder and a probabilistic embedding in parallel. This produces a rich representation of reference motions from a minimal input set, enabling improved generalization across diverse motion styles and morphologies. We evaluate MDME on retargeting-free real-time motion imitation by conditioning robot control policies on the learned embeddings, demonstrating accurate reproduction of complex trajectories on both humanoid and quadruped platforms. Our comparative studies confirm that MDME outperforms prior approaches in reconstruction fidelity and generalizability to unseen motions. Furthermore, we demonstrate that MDME can reproduce novel motion styles in real-time through zero-shot deployment, eliminating the need for task-specific tuning or online retargeting. These results position MDME as a generalizable and structure-aware foundation for scalable real-time robot imitation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_07673
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Multi-Domain Motion Embedding: Expressive Real-Time Mimicry for Legged Robots
Heyrman, Matthias
Li, Chenhao
Klemm, Victor
Kang, Dongho
Coros, Stelian
Hutter, Marco
Robotics
Effective motion representation is crucial for enabling robots to imitate expressive behaviors in real time, yet existing motion controllers often ignore inherent patterns in motion. Previous efforts in representation learning do not attempt to jointly capture structured periodic patterns and irregular variations in human and animal movement. To address this, we present Multi-Domain Motion Embedding (MDME), a motion representation that unifies the embedding of structured and unstructured features using a wavelet-based encoder and a probabilistic embedding in parallel. This produces a rich representation of reference motions from a minimal input set, enabling improved generalization across diverse motion styles and morphologies. We evaluate MDME on retargeting-free real-time motion imitation by conditioning robot control policies on the learned embeddings, demonstrating accurate reproduction of complex trajectories on both humanoid and quadruped platforms. Our comparative studies confirm that MDME outperforms prior approaches in reconstruction fidelity and generalizability to unseen motions. Furthermore, we demonstrate that MDME can reproduce novel motion styles in real-time through zero-shot deployment, eliminating the need for task-specific tuning or online retargeting. These results position MDME as a generalizable and structure-aware foundation for scalable real-time robot imitation.
title Multi-Domain Motion Embedding: Expressive Real-Time Mimicry for Legged Robots
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.07673