Chasing Autonomy: Dynamic Retargeting and Control Guided RL for Performant and Controllable Humanoid Running

Fuente: arXiv
Enregistré dans:
Détails bibliographiques
Auteurs principaux: Olkin, Zachary, Compton, William D., Bena, Ryan M., Ames, Aaron D.
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
Sujets:
Accès en ligne:
Tags: Ajouter un tag
Pas de tags, Soyez le premier à ajouter un tag!
_version_ 1866914425923960832
author Olkin, Zachary
Compton, William D.
Bena, Ryan M.
Ames, Aaron D.
author_facet Olkin, Zachary
Compton, William D.
Bena, Ryan M.
Ames, Aaron D.
contents 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.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_25902
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Chasing Autonomy: Dynamic Retargeting and Control Guided RL for Performant and Controllable Humanoid Running
Olkin, Zachary
Compton, William D.
Bena, Ryan M.
Ames, Aaron D.
Robotics
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.
title Chasing Autonomy: Dynamic Retargeting and Control Guided RL for Performant and Controllable Humanoid Running
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.25902