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May 28

Whole-body Motion Control of an Omnidirectional Wheel-Legged Mobile Manipulator via Contact-Aware Dynamic Optimization

Wheel-legged robots with integrated manipulators hold great promise for mobile manipulation in logistics, industrial automation, and human-robot collaboration. However, unified control of such systems remains challenging due to the redundancy in degrees of freedom, complex wheel-ground contact dynamics, and the need for seamless coordination between locomotion and manipulation. In this work, we present the design and whole-body motion control of an omnidirectional wheel-legged quadrupedal robot equipped with a dexterous manipulator. The proposed platform incorporates independently actuated steering modules and hub-driven wheels, enabling agile omnidirectional locomotion with high maneuverability in structured environments. To address the challenges of contact-rich interaction, we develop a contact-aware whole-body dynamic optimization framework that integrates point-contact modeling for manipulation with line-contact modeling for wheel-ground interactions. A warm-start strategy is introduced to accelerate online optimization, ensuring real-time feasibility for high-dimensional control. Furthermore, a unified kinematic model tailored for the robot's 4WIS-4WID actuation scheme eliminates the need for mode switching across different locomotion strategies, improving control consistency and robustness. Simulation and experimental results validate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, demonstrating agile terrain traversal, high-speed omnidirectional mobility, and precise manipulation under diverse scenarios, underscoring the system's potential for factory automation, urban logistics, and service robotics in semi-structured environments.

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 17, 2025

Vision-Only Robot Navigation in a Neural Radiance World

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) have recently emerged as a powerful paradigm for the representation of natural, complex 3D scenes. NeRFs represent continuous volumetric density and RGB values in a neural network, and generate photo-realistic images from unseen camera viewpoints through ray tracing. We propose an algorithm for navigating a robot through a 3D environment represented as a NeRF using only an on-board RGB camera for localization. We assume the NeRF for the scene has been pre-trained offline, and the robot's objective is to navigate through unoccupied space in the NeRF to reach a goal pose. We introduce a trajectory optimization algorithm that avoids collisions with high-density regions in the NeRF based on a discrete time version of differential flatness that is amenable to constraining the robot's full pose and control inputs. We also introduce an optimization based filtering method to estimate 6DoF pose and velocities for the robot in the NeRF given only an onboard RGB camera. We combine the trajectory planner with the pose filter in an online replanning loop to give a vision-based robot navigation pipeline. We present simulation results with a quadrotor robot navigating through a jungle gym environment, the inside of a church, and Stonehenge using only an RGB camera. We also demonstrate an omnidirectional ground robot navigating through the church, requiring it to reorient to fit through the narrow gap. Videos of this work can be found at https://mikh3x4.github.io/nerf-navigation/ .

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 30, 2021

OmniRetarget: Interaction-Preserving Data Generation for Humanoid Whole-Body Loco-Manipulation and Scene Interaction

A dominant paradigm for teaching humanoid robots complex skills is to retarget human motions as kinematic references to train reinforcement learning (RL) policies. However, existing retargeting pipelines often struggle with the significant embodiment gap between humans and robots, producing physically implausible artifacts like foot-skating and penetration. More importantly, common retargeting methods neglect the rich human-object and human-environment interactions essential for expressive locomotion and loco-manipulation. To address this, we introduce OmniRetarget, an interaction-preserving data generation engine based on an interaction mesh that explicitly models and preserves the crucial spatial and contact relationships between an agent, the terrain, and manipulated objects. By minimizing the Laplacian deformation between the human and robot meshes while enforcing kinematic constraints, OmniRetarget generates kinematically feasible trajectories. Moreover, preserving task-relevant interactions enables efficient data augmentation, from a single demonstration to different robot embodiments, terrains, and object configurations. We comprehensively evaluate OmniRetarget by retargeting motions from OMOMO, LAFAN1, and our in-house MoCap datasets, generating over 8-hour trajectories that achieve better kinematic constraint satisfaction and contact preservation than widely used baselines. Such high-quality data enables proprioceptive RL policies to successfully execute long-horizon (up to 30 seconds) parkour and loco-manipulation skills on a Unitree G1 humanoid, trained with only 5 reward terms and simple domain randomization shared by all tasks, without any learning curriculum.

  • 9 authors
·
Sep 30, 2025 2

Dexterous Legged Locomotion in Confined 3D Spaces with Reinforcement Learning

Recent advances of locomotion controllers utilizing deep reinforcement learning (RL) have yielded impressive results in terms of achieving rapid and robust locomotion across challenging terrain, such as rugged rocks, non-rigid ground, and slippery surfaces. However, while these controllers primarily address challenges underneath the robot, relatively little research has investigated legged mobility through confined 3D spaces, such as narrow tunnels or irregular voids, which impose all-around constraints. The cyclic gait patterns resulted from existing RL-based methods to learn parameterized locomotion skills characterized by motion parameters, such as velocity and body height, may not be adequate to navigate robots through challenging confined 3D spaces, requiring both agile 3D obstacle avoidance and robust legged locomotion. Instead, we propose to learn locomotion skills end-to-end from goal-oriented navigation in confined 3D spaces. To address the inefficiency of tracking distant navigation goals, we introduce a hierarchical locomotion controller that combines a classical planner tasked with planning waypoints to reach a faraway global goal location, and an RL-based policy trained to follow these waypoints by generating low-level motion commands. This approach allows the policy to explore its own locomotion skills within the entire solution space and facilitates smooth transitions between local goals, enabling long-term navigation towards distant goals. In simulation, our hierarchical approach succeeds at navigating through demanding confined 3D environments, outperforming both pure end-to-end learning approaches and parameterized locomotion skills. We further demonstrate the successful real-world deployment of our simulation-trained controller on a real robot.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 6, 2024

OmniZoomer: Learning to Move and Zoom in on Sphere at High-Resolution

Omnidirectional images (ODIs) have become increasingly popular, as their large field-of-view (FoV) can offer viewers the chance to freely choose the view directions in immersive environments such as virtual reality. The M\"obius transformation is typically employed to further provide the opportunity for movement and zoom on ODIs, but applying it to the image level often results in blurry effect and aliasing problem. In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning-based approach, called OmniZoomer, to incorporate the M\"obius transformation into the network for movement and zoom on ODIs. By learning various transformed feature maps under different conditions, the network is enhanced to handle the increasing edge curvatures, which alleviates the blurry effect. Moreover, to address the aliasing problem, we propose two key components. Firstly, to compensate for the lack of pixels for describing curves, we enhance the feature maps in the high-resolution (HR) space and calculate the transformed index map with a spatial index generation module. Secondly, considering that ODIs are inherently represented in the spherical space, we propose a spherical resampling module that combines the index map and HR feature maps to transform the feature maps for better spherical correlation. The transformed feature maps are decoded to output a zoomed ODI. Experiments show that our method can produce HR and high-quality ODIs with the flexibility to move and zoom in to the object of interest. Project page is available at http://vlislab22.github.io/OmniZoomer/.

  • 6 authors
·
Aug 15, 2023

Learning Whole-Body Humanoid Locomotion via Motion Generation and Motion Tracking

Whole-body humanoid locomotion is challenging due to high-dimensional control, morphological instability, and the need for real-time adaptation to various terrains using onboard perception. Directly applying reinforcement learning (RL) with reward shaping to humanoid locomotion often leads to lower-body-dominated behaviors, whereas imitation-based RL can learn more coordinated whole-body skills but is typically limited to replaying reference motions without a mechanism to adapt them online from perception for terrain-aware locomotion. To address this gap, we propose a whole-body humanoid locomotion framework that combines skills learned from reference motions with terrain-aware adaptation. We first train a diffusion model on retargeted human motions for real-time prediction of terrain-aware reference motions. Concurrently, we train a whole-body reference tracker with RL using this motion data. To improve robustness under imperfectly generated references, we further fine-tune the tracker with a frozen motion generator in a closed-loop setting. The resulting system supports directional goal-reaching control with terrain-aware whole-body adaptation, and can be deployed on a Unitree G1 humanoid robot with onboard perception and computation. The hardware experiments demonstrate successful traversal over boxes, hurdles, stairs, and mixed terrain combinations. Quantitative results further show the benefits of incorporating online motion generation and fine-tuning the motion tracker for improved generalization and robustness.

  • 10 authors
·
Apr 18

Omnidirectional Multi-Object Tracking

Panoramic imagery, with its 360{\deg} field of view, offers comprehensive information to support Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) in capturing spatial and temporal relationships of surrounding objects. However, most MOT algorithms are tailored for pinhole images with limited views, impairing their effectiveness in panoramic settings. Additionally, panoramic image distortions, such as resolution loss, geometric deformation, and uneven lighting, hinder direct adaptation of existing MOT methods, leading to significant performance degradation. To address these challenges, we propose OmniTrack, an omnidirectional MOT framework that incorporates Tracklet Management to introduce temporal cues, FlexiTrack Instances for object localization and association, and the CircularStatE Module to alleviate image and geometric distortions. This integration enables tracking in panoramic field-of-view scenarios, even under rapid sensor motion. To mitigate the lack of panoramic MOT datasets, we introduce the QuadTrack dataset--a comprehensive panoramic dataset collected by a quadruped robot, featuring diverse challenges such as panoramic fields of view, intense motion, and complex environments. Extensive experiments on the public JRDB dataset and the newly introduced QuadTrack benchmark demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of the proposed framework. OmniTrack achieves a HOTA score of 26.92% on JRDB, representing an improvement of 3.43%, and further achieves 23.45% on QuadTrack, surpassing the baseline by 6.81%. The established dataset and source code are available at https://github.com/xifen523/OmniTrack.

  • 9 authors
·
Mar 6, 2025

OmniDrag: Enabling Motion Control for Omnidirectional Image-to-Video Generation

As virtual reality gains popularity, the demand for controllable creation of immersive and dynamic omnidirectional videos (ODVs) is increasing. While previous text-to-ODV generation methods achieve impressive results, they struggle with content inaccuracies and inconsistencies due to reliance solely on textual inputs. Although recent motion control techniques provide fine-grained control for video generation, directly applying these methods to ODVs often results in spatial distortion and unsatisfactory performance, especially with complex spherical motions. To tackle these challenges, we propose OmniDrag, the first approach enabling both scene- and object-level motion control for accurate, high-quality omnidirectional image-to-video generation. Building on pretrained video diffusion models, we introduce an omnidirectional control module, which is jointly fine-tuned with temporal attention layers to effectively handle complex spherical motion. In addition, we develop a novel spherical motion estimator that accurately extracts motion-control signals and allows users to perform drag-style ODV generation by simply drawing handle and target points. We also present a new dataset, named Move360, addressing the scarcity of ODV data with large scene and object motions. Experiments demonstrate the significant superiority of OmniDrag in achieving holistic scene-level and fine-grained object-level control for ODV generation. The project page is available at https://lwq20020127.github.io/OmniDrag.

  • 9 authors
·
Dec 12, 2024

VLNVerse: A Benchmark for Vision-Language Navigation with Versatile, Embodied, Realistic Simulation and Evaluation

Despite remarkable progress in Vision-Language Navigation (VLN), existing benchmarks remain confined to fixed, small-scale datasets with naive physical simulation. These shortcomings limit the insight that the benchmarks provide into sim-to-real generalization, and create a significant research gap. Furthermore, task fragmentation prevents unified/shared progress in the area, while limited data scales fail to meet the demands of modern LLM-based pretraining. To overcome these limitations, we introduce VLNVerse: a new large-scale, extensible benchmark designed for Versatile, Embodied, Realistic Simulation, and Evaluation. VLNVerse redefines VLN as a scalable, full-stack embodied AI problem. Its Versatile nature unifies previously fragmented tasks into a single framework and provides an extensible toolkit for researchers. Its Embodied design moves beyond intangible and teleporting "ghost" agents that support full-kinematics in a Realistic Simulation powered by a robust physics engine. We leverage the scale and diversity of VLNVerse to conduct a comprehensive Evaluation of existing methods, from classic models to MLLM-based agents. We also propose a novel unified multi-task model capable of addressing all tasks within the benchmark. VLNVerse aims to narrow the gap between simulated navigation and real-world generalization, providing the community with a vital tool to boost research towards scalable, general-purpose embodied locomotion agents.

  • 13 authors
·
Dec 21, 2025

A Reconfigured Wheel-Legged Robot for Enhanced Steering and Adaptability

Wheel-legged robots integrate leg agility on rough terrain with wheel efficiency on flat ground. However, most existing designs do not fully capitalize on the benefits of both legged and wheeled structures, which limits overall system flexibility and efficiency. We present FLORES, a novel wheel-legged robot design featuring a distinctive front-leg configuration that sets it beyond standard design approaches. Specifically, FLORES replaces the conventional hip-roll degree of freedom (DoF) of the front leg with hip-yaw DoFs, and this allows for efficient movement on flat surfaces while ensuring adaptability when navigating complex terrains. This innovative design facilitates seamless transitions between different locomotion modes (i.e., legged locomotion and wheeled locomotion) and optimizes the performance across varied environments. To fully exploit \flores's mechanical capabilities, we develop a tailored reinforcement learning (RL) controller that adapts the Hybrid Internal Model (HIM) with a customized reward structure optimized for our unique mechanical configuration. This framework enables the generation of adaptive, multi-modal locomotion strategies that facilitate smooth transitions between wheeled and legged movements. Furthermore, our distinctive joint design enables the robot to exhibit novel and highly efficient locomotion gaits that capitalize on the synergistic advantages of both locomotion modes. Through comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate FLORES's enhanced steering capabilities, improved navigation efficiency, and versatile locomotion across various terrains. The open-source project can be found at https://github.com/ZhichengSong6/FLORES.

Adaptive Legged Locomotion via Online Learning for Model Predictive Control

We provide an algorithm for adaptive legged locomotion via online learning and model predictive control. The algorithm is composed of two interacting modules: model predictive control (MPC) and online learning of residual dynamics. The residual dynamics can represent modeling errors and external disturbances. We are motivated by the future of autonomy where quadrupeds will autonomously perform complex tasks despite real-world unknown uncertainty, such as unknown payload and uneven terrains. The algorithm uses random Fourier features to approximate the residual dynamics in reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces. Then, it employs MPC based on the current learned model of the residual dynamics. The model is updated online in a self-supervised manner using least squares based on the data collected while controlling the quadruped. The algorithm enjoys sublinear dynamic regret, defined as the suboptimality against an optimal clairvoyant controller that knows how the residual dynamics. We validate our algorithm in Gazebo and MuJoCo simulations, where the quadruped aims to track reference trajectories. The Gazebo simulations include constant unknown external forces up to 12g, where g is the gravity vector, in flat terrain, slope terrain with 20degree inclination, and rough terrain with 0.25m height variation. The MuJoCo simulations include time-varying unknown disturbances with payload up to 8~kg and time-varying ground friction coefficients in flat terrain.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 17, 2025

MLM: Learning Multi-task Loco-Manipulation Whole-Body Control for Quadruped Robot with Arm

Whole-body loco-manipulation for quadruped robots with arms remains a challenging problem, particularly in achieving multi-task control. To address this, we propose MLM, a reinforcement learning framework driven by both real-world and simulation data. It enables a six-DoF robotic arm-equipped quadruped robot to perform whole-body loco-manipulation for multiple tasks autonomously or under human teleoperation. To address the problem of balancing multiple tasks during the learning of loco-manipulation, we introduce a trajectory library with an adaptive, curriculum-based sampling mechanism. This approach allows the policy to efficiently leverage real-world collected trajectories for learning multi-task loco-manipulation. To address deployment scenarios with only historical observations and to enhance the performance of policy execution across tasks with different spatial ranges, we propose a Trajectory-Velocity Prediction policy network. It predicts unobservable future trajectories and velocities. By leveraging extensive simulation data and curriculum-based rewards, our controller achieves whole-body behaviors in simulation and zero-shot transfer to real-world deployment. Ablation studies in simulation verify the necessity and effectiveness of our approach, while real-world experiments on a Go2 robot with an Airbot robotic arm demonstrate the policy's good performance in multi-task execution.

  • 17 authors
·
Aug 14, 2025

Learning H-Infinity Locomotion Control

Stable locomotion in precipitous environments is an essential capability of quadruped robots, demanding the ability to resist various external disturbances. However, recent learning-based policies only use basic domain randomization to improve the robustness of learned policies, which cannot guarantee that the robot has adequate disturbance resistance capabilities. In this paper, we propose to model the learning process as an adversarial interaction between the actor and a newly introduced disturber and ensure their optimization with H_{infty} constraint. In contrast to the actor that maximizes the discounted overall reward, the disturber is responsible for generating effective external forces and is optimized by maximizing the error between the task reward and its oracle, i.e., "cost" in each iteration. To keep joint optimization between the actor and the disturber stable, our H_{infty} constraint mandates the bound of ratio between the cost to the intensity of the external forces. Through reciprocal interaction throughout the training phase, the actor can acquire the capability to navigate increasingly complex physical disturbances. We verify the robustness of our approach on quadrupedal locomotion tasks with Unitree Aliengo robot, and also a more challenging task with Unitree A1 robot, where the quadruped is expected to perform locomotion merely on its hind legs as if it is a bipedal robot. The simulated quantitative results show improvement against baselines, demonstrating the effectiveness of the method and each design choice. On the other hand, real-robot experiments qualitatively exhibit how robust the policy is when interfering with various disturbances on various terrains, including stairs, high platforms, slopes, and slippery terrains. All code, checkpoints, and real-world deployment guidance will be made public.

  • 6 authors
·
Apr 22, 2024 1

A Hierarchical Framework for Humanoid Locomotion with Supernumerary Limbs

The integration of Supernumerary Limbs (SLs) on humanoid robots poses a significant stability challenge due to the dynamic perturbations they introduce. This thesis addresses this issue by designing a novel hierarchical control architecture to improve humanoid locomotion stability with SLs. The core of this framework is a decoupled strategy that combines learning-based locomotion with model-based balancing. The low-level component consists of a walking gait for a Unitree H1 humanoid through imitation learning and curriculum learning. The high-level component actively utilizes the SLs for dynamic balancing. The effectiveness of the system is evaluated in a physics-based simulation under three conditions: baseline gait for an unladen humanoid (baseline walking), walking with a static SL payload (static payload), and walking with the active dynamic balancing controller (dynamic balancing). Our evaluation shows that the dynamic balancing controller improves stability. Compared to the static payload condition, the balancing strategy yields a gait pattern closer to the baseline and decreases the Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) distance of the CoM trajectory by 47\%. The balancing controller also improves the re-stabilization within gait cycles and achieves a more coordinated anti-phase pattern of Ground Reaction Forces (GRF). The results demonstrate that a decoupled, hierarchical design can effectively mitigate the internal dynamic disturbances arising from the mass and movement of the SLs, enabling stable locomotion for humanoids equipped with functional limbs. Code and videos are available here: https://github.com/heyzbw/HuSLs.

BeyondMimic: From Motion Tracking to Versatile Humanoid Control via Guided Diffusion

The human-like form of humanoid robots positions them uniquely to achieve the agility and versatility in motor skills that humans possess. Learning from human demonstrations offers a scalable approach to acquiring these capabilities. However, prior works either produce unnatural motions or rely on motion-specific tuning to achieve satisfactory naturalness. Furthermore, these methods are often motion- or goal-specific, lacking the versatility to compose diverse skills, especially when solving unseen tasks. We present BeyondMimic, a framework that scales to diverse motions and carries the versatility to compose them seamlessly in tackling unseen downstream tasks. At heart, a compact motion-tracking formulation enables mastering a wide range of radically agile behaviors, including aerial cartwheels, spin-kicks, flip-kicks, and sprinting, with a single setup and shared hyperparameters, all while achieving state-of-the-art human-like performance. Moving beyond the mere imitation of existing motions, we propose a unified latent diffusion model that empowers versatile goal specification, seamless task switching, and dynamic composition of these agile behaviors. Leveraging classifier guidance, a diffusion-specific technique for test-time optimization toward novel objectives, our model extends its capability to solve downstream tasks never encountered during training, including motion inpainting, joystick teleoperation, and obstacle avoidance, and transfers these skills zero-shot to real hardware. This work opens new frontiers for humanoid robots by pushing the limits of scalable human-like motor skill acquisition from human motion and advancing seamless motion synthesis that achieves generalization and versatility beyond training setups.

  • 7 authors
·
Aug 11, 2025

AME-2: Agile and Generalized Legged Locomotion via Attention-Based Neural Map Encoding

Achieving agile and generalized legged locomotion across terrains requires tight integration of perception and control, especially under occlusions and sparse footholds. Existing methods have demonstrated agility on parkour courses but often rely on end-to-end sensorimotor models with limited generalization and interpretability. By contrast, methods targeting generalized locomotion typically exhibit limited agility and struggle with visual occlusions. We introduce AME-2, a unified reinforcement learning (RL) framework for agile and generalized locomotion that incorporates a novel attention-based map encoder in the control policy. This encoder extracts local and global mapping features and uses attention mechanisms to focus on salient regions, producing an interpretable and generalized embedding for RL-based control. We further propose a learning-based mapping pipeline that provides fast, uncertainty-aware terrain representations robust to noise and occlusions, serving as policy inputs. It uses neural networks to convert depth observations into local elevations with uncertainties, and fuses them with odometry. The pipeline also integrates with parallel simulation so that we can train controllers with online mapping, aiding sim-to-real transfer. We validate AME-2 with the proposed mapping pipeline on a quadruped and a biped robot, and the resulting controllers demonstrate strong agility and generalization to unseen terrains in simulation and in real-world experiments.

  • 4 authors
·
Jan 13

Agility Meets Stability: Versatile Humanoid Control with Heterogeneous Data

Humanoid robots are envisioned to perform a wide range of tasks in human-centered environments, requiring controllers that combine agility with robust balance. Recent advances in locomotion and whole-body tracking have enabled impressive progress in either agile dynamic skills or stability-critical behaviors, but existing methods remain specialized, focusing on one capability while compromising the other. In this work, we introduce AMS (Agility Meets Stability), the first framework that unifies both dynamic motion tracking and extreme balance maintenance in a single policy. Our key insight is to leverage heterogeneous data sources: human motion capture datasets that provide rich, agile behaviors, and physically constrained synthetic balance motions that capture stability configurations. To reconcile the divergent optimization goals of agility and stability, we design a hybrid reward scheme that applies general tracking objectives across all data while injecting balance-specific priors only into synthetic motions. Further, an adaptive learning strategy with performance-driven sampling and motion-specific reward shaping enables efficient training across diverse motion distributions. We validate AMS extensively in simulation and on a real Unitree G1 humanoid. Experiments demonstrate that a single policy can execute agile skills such as dancing and running, while also performing zero-shot extreme balance motions like Ip Man's Squat, highlighting AMS as a versatile control paradigm for future humanoid applications.

  • 11 authors
·
Nov 21, 2025

One Flight Over the Gap: A Survey from Perspective to Panoramic Vision

Driven by the demand for spatial intelligence and holistic scene perception, omnidirectional images (ODIs), which provide a complete 360 field of view, are receiving growing attention across diverse applications such as virtual reality, autonomous driving, and embodied robotics. Despite their unique characteristics, ODIs exhibit remarkable differences from perspective images in geometric projection, spatial distribution, and boundary continuity, making it challenging for direct domain adaption from perspective methods. This survey reviews recent panoramic vision techniques with a particular emphasis on the perspective-to-panorama adaptation. We first revisit the panoramic imaging pipeline and projection methods to build the prior knowledge required for analyzing the structural disparities. Then, we summarize three challenges of domain adaptation: severe geometric distortions near the poles, non-uniform sampling in Equirectangular Projection (ERP), and periodic boundary continuity. Building on this, we cover 20+ representative tasks drawn from more than 300 research papers in two dimensions. On one hand, we present a cross-method analysis of representative strategies for addressing panoramic specific challenges across different tasks. On the other hand, we conduct a cross-task comparison and classify panoramic vision into four major categories: visual quality enhancement and assessment, visual understanding, multimodal understanding, and visual generation. In addition, we discuss open challenges and future directions in data, models, and applications that will drive the advancement of panoramic vision research. We hope that our work can provide new insight and forward looking perspectives to advance the development of panoramic vision technologies. Our project page is https://insta360-research-team.github.io/Survey-of-Panorama

  • 11 authors
·
Sep 4, 2025

EgoHumanoid: Unlocking In-the-Wild Loco-Manipulation with Robot-Free Egocentric Demonstration

Human demonstrations offer rich environmental diversity and scale naturally, making them an appealing alternative to robot teleoperation. While this paradigm has advanced robot-arm manipulation, its potential for the more challenging, data-hungry problem of humanoid loco-manipulation remains largely unexplored. We present EgoHumanoid, the first framework to co-train a vision-language-action policy using abundant egocentric human demonstrations together with a limited amount of robot data, enabling humanoids to perform loco-manipulation across diverse real-world environments. To bridge the embodiment gap between humans and robots, including discrepancies in physical morphology and viewpoint, we introduce a systematic alignment pipeline spanning from hardware design to data processing. A portable system for scalable human data collection is developed, and we establish practical collection protocols to improve transferability. At the core of our human-to-humanoid alignment pipeline lies two key components. The view alignment reduces visual domain discrepancies caused by camera height and perspective variation. The action alignment maps human motions into a unified, kinematically feasible action space for humanoid control. Extensive real-world experiments demonstrate that incorporating robot-free egocentric data significantly outperforms robot-only baselines by 51\%, particularly in unseen environments. Our analysis further reveals which behaviors transfer effectively and the potential for scaling human data.

  • 9 authors
·
Feb 10 2

Robust Humanoid Walking on Compliant and Uneven Terrain with Deep Reinforcement Learning

For the deployment of legged robots in real-world environments, it is essential to develop robust locomotion control methods for challenging terrains that may exhibit unexpected deformability and irregularity. In this paper, we explore the application of sim-to-real deep reinforcement learning (RL) for the design of bipedal locomotion controllers for humanoid robots on compliant and uneven terrains. Our key contribution is to show that a simple training curriculum for exposing the RL agent to randomized terrains in simulation can achieve robust walking on a real humanoid robot using only proprioceptive feedback. We train an end-to-end bipedal locomotion policy using the proposed approach, and show extensive real-robot demonstration on the HRP-5P humanoid over several difficult terrains inside and outside the lab environment. Further, we argue that the robustness of a bipedal walking policy can be improved if the robot is allowed to exhibit aperiodic motion with variable stepping frequency. We propose a new control policy to enable modification of the observed clock signal, leading to adaptive gait frequencies depending on the terrain and command velocity. Through simulation experiments, we show the effectiveness of this policy specifically for walking over challenging terrains by controlling swing and stance durations. The code for training and evaluation is available online at https://github.com/rohanpsingh/LearningHumanoidWalking. Demo video is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgfNzGAkk2Q.

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 18, 2025

Perceptive Humanoid Parkour: Chaining Dynamic Human Skills via Motion Matching

While recent advances in humanoid locomotion have achieved stable walking on varied terrains, capturing the agility and adaptivity of highly dynamic human motions remains an open challenge. In particular, agile parkour in complex environments demands not only low-level robustness, but also human-like motion expressiveness, long-horizon skill composition, and perception-driven decision-making. In this paper, we present Perceptive Humanoid Parkour (PHP), a modular framework that enables humanoid robots to autonomously perform long-horizon, vision-based parkour across challenging obstacle courses. Our approach first leverages motion matching, formulated as nearest-neighbor search in a feature space, to compose retargeted atomic human skills into long-horizon kinematic trajectories. This framework enables the flexible composition and smooth transition of complex skill chains while preserving the elegance and fluidity of dynamic human motions. Next, we train motion-tracking reinforcement learning (RL) expert policies for these composed motions, and distill them into a single depth-based, multi-skill student policy, using a combination of DAgger and RL. Crucially, the combination of perception and skill composition enables autonomous, context-aware decision-making: using only onboard depth sensing and a discrete 2D velocity command, the robot selects and executes whether to step over, climb onto, vault or roll off obstacles of varying geometries and heights. We validate our framework with extensive real-world experiments on a Unitree G1 humanoid robot, demonstrating highly dynamic parkour skills such as climbing tall obstacles up to 1.25m (96% robot height), as well as long-horizon multi-obstacle traversal with closed-loop adaptation to real-time obstacle perturbations.

  • 11 authors
·
May 5

ULTRA: Unified Multimodal Control for Autonomous Humanoid Whole-Body Loco-Manipulation

Achieving autonomous and versatile whole-body loco-manipulation remains a central barrier to making humanoids practically useful. Yet existing approaches are fundamentally constrained: retargeted data are often scarce or low-quality; methods struggle to scale to large skill repertoires; and, most importantly, they rely on tracking predefined motion references rather than generating behavior from perception and high-level task specifications. To address these limitations, we propose ULTRA, a unified framework with two key components. First, we introduce a physics-driven neural retargeting algorithm that translates large-scale motion capture to humanoid embodiments while preserving physical plausibility for contact-rich interactions. Second, we learn a unified multimodal controller that supports both dense references and sparse task specifications, under sensing ranging from accurate motion-capture state to noisy egocentric visual inputs. We distill a universal tracking policy into this controller, compress motor skills into a compact latent space, and apply reinforcement learning finetuning to expand coverage and improve robustness under out-of-distribution scenarios. This enables coordinated whole-body behavior from sparse intent without test-time reference motions. We evaluate ULTRA in simulation and on a real Unitree G1 humanoid. Results show that ULTRA generalizes to autonomous, goal-conditioned whole-body loco-manipulation from egocentric perception, consistently outperforming tracking-only baselines with limited skills.

Hybrid Internal Model: A Simple and Efficient Learner for Agile Legged Locomotion

Robust locomotion control depends on accurate state estimations. However, the sensors of most legged robots can only provide partial and noisy observations, making the estimation particularly challenging, especially for external states like terrain frictions and elevation maps. Inspired by the classical Internal Model Control principle, we consider these external states as disturbances and introduce Hybrid Internal Model (HIM) to estimate them according to the response of the robot. The response, which we refer to as the hybrid internal embedding, contains the robot's explicit velocity and implicit stability representation, corresponding to two primary goals for locomotion tasks: explicitly tracking velocity and implicitly maintaining stability. We use contrastive learning to optimize the embedding to be close to the robot's successor state, in which the response is naturally embedded. HIM has several appealing benefits: It only needs the robot's proprioceptions, i.e., those from joint encoders and IMU as observations. It innovatively maintains consistent observations between simulation reference and reality that avoids information loss in mimicking learning. It exploits batch-level information that is more robust to noises and keeps better sample efficiency. It only requires 1 hour of training on an RTX 4090 to enable a quadruped robot to traverse any terrain under any disturbances. A wealth of real-world experiments demonstrates its agility, even in high-difficulty tasks and cases never occurred during the training process, revealing remarkable open-world generalizability.

  • 6 authors
·
Dec 18, 2023

SkillBlender: Towards Versatile Humanoid Whole-Body Loco-Manipulation via Skill Blending

Humanoid robots hold significant potential in accomplishing daily tasks across diverse environments thanks to their flexibility and human-like morphology. Recent works have made significant progress in humanoid whole-body control and loco-manipulation leveraging optimal control or reinforcement learning. However, these methods require tedious task-specific tuning for each task to achieve satisfactory behaviors, limiting their versatility and scalability to diverse tasks in daily scenarios. To that end, we introduce SkillBlender, a novel hierarchical reinforcement learning framework for versatile humanoid loco-manipulation. SkillBlender first pretrains goal-conditioned task-agnostic primitive skills, and then dynamically blends these skills to accomplish complex loco-manipulation tasks with minimal task-specific reward engineering. We also introduce SkillBench, a parallel, cross-embodiment, and diverse simulated benchmark containing three embodiments, four primitive skills, and eight challenging loco-manipulation tasks, accompanied by a set of scientific evaluation metrics balancing accuracy and feasibility. Extensive simulated experiments show that our method significantly outperforms all baselines, while naturally regularizing behaviors to avoid reward hacking, resulting in more accurate and feasible movements for diverse loco-manipulation tasks in our daily scenarios. Our code and benchmark will be open-sourced to the community to facilitate future research. Project page: https://usc-gvl.github.io/SkillBlender-web/.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 10, 2025 2

BioMoDiffuse: Physics-Guided Biomechanical Diffusion for Controllable and Authentic Human Motion Synthesis

Human motion generation holds significant promise in fields such as animation, film production, and robotics. However, existing methods often fail to produce physically plausible movements that adhere to biomechanical principles. While recent autoregressive and diffusion models have improved visual quality, they frequently overlook essential biodynamic features, such as muscle activation patterns and joint coordination, leading to motions that either violate physical laws or lack controllability. This paper introduces BioMoDiffuse, a novel biomechanics-aware diffusion framework that addresses these limitations. It features three key innovations: (1) A lightweight biodynamic network that integrates muscle electromyography (EMG) signals and kinematic features with acceleration constraints, (2) A physics-guided diffusion process that incorporates real-time biomechanical verification via modified Euler-Lagrange equations, and (3) A decoupled control mechanism that allows independent regulation of motion speed and semantic context. We also propose a set of comprehensive evaluation protocols that combines traditional metrics (FID, R-precision, etc.) with new biomechanical criteria (smoothness, foot sliding, floating, etc.). Our approach bridges the gap between data-driven motion synthesis and biomechanical authenticity, establishing new benchmarks for physically accurate motion generation.

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 8, 2025

OmniHumanoid: Streaming Cross-Embodiment Video Generation with Paired-Free Adaptation

Cross-embodiment video generation aims to transfer motions across different humanoid embodiments, such as human-to-robot and robot-to-robot, enabling scalable data generation for embodied intelligence. A major challenge in this setting is that motion dynamics are partly transferable across embodiments, whereas appearance and morphology remain embodiment-specific. Existing approaches often entangle these factors, and many require paired data for every target embodiment, which limits scalability to new robots. We present OmniHumanoid, a framework that factorizes transferable motion learning and embodiment-specific adaptation. Our method learns a shared motion transfer model from motion-aligned paired videos spanning multiple embodiments, while adapting to a new embodiment using only unpaired videos through lightweight embodiment-specific adapters. To reduce interference between motion transfer and embodiment adaptation, we further introduce a branch-isolated attention design that separates motion conditioning from embodiment-specific modulation. In addition, we construct a synthetic cross-embodiment dataset with motion-aligned paired videos rendered across diverse humanoid assets, scenes, and viewpoints. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world benchmarks show that OmniHumanoid achieves strong motion fidelity and embodiment consistency, while enabling scalable adaptation to unseen humanoid embodiments without retraining the shared motion model.

  • 5 authors
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May 11 2

Gaitor: Learning a Unified Representation Across Gaits for Real-World Quadruped Locomotion

The current state-of-the-art in quadruped locomotion is able to produce a variety of complex motions. These methods either rely on switching between a discrete set of skills or learn a distribution across gaits using complex black-box models. Alternatively, we present Gaitor, which learns a disentangled and 2D representation across locomotion gaits. This learnt representation forms a planning space for closed-loop control delivering continuous gait transitions and perceptive terrain traversal. Gaitor's latent space is readily interpretable and we discover that during gait transitions, novel unseen gaits emerge. The latent space is disentangled with respect to footswing heights and lengths. This means that these gait characteristics can be varied independently in the 2D latent representation. Together with a simple terrain encoding and a learnt planner operating in the latent space, Gaitor can take motion commands including desired gait type and swing characteristics all while reacting to uneven terrain. We evaluate Gaitor in both simulation and the real world on the ANYmal C platform. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work learning a unified and interpretable latent space for multiple gaits, resulting in continuous blending between different locomotion modes on a real quadruped robot. An overview of the methods and results in this paper is found at https://youtu.be/eVFQbRyilCA.

  • 5 authors
·
May 29, 2024

Kinodynamic RRT*: Optimal Motion Planning for Systems with Linear Differential Constraints

We present Kinodynamic RRT*, an incremental sampling-based approach for asymptotically optimal motion planning for robots with linear differential constraints. Our approach extends RRT*, which was introduced for holonomic robots (Karaman et al. 2011), by using a fixed-final-state-free-final-time controller that exactly and optimally connects any pair of states, where the cost function is expressed as a trade-off between the duration of a trajectory and the expended control effort. Our approach generalizes earlier work on extending RRT* to kinodynamic systems, as it guarantees asymptotic optimality for any system with controllable linear dynamics, in state spaces of any dimension. Our approach can be applied to non-linear dynamics as well by using their first-order Taylor approximations. In addition, we show that for the rich subclass of systems with a nilpotent dynamics matrix, closed-form solutions for optimal trajectories can be derived, which keeps the computational overhead of our algorithm compared to traditional RRT* at a minimum. We demonstrate the potential of our approach by computing asymptotically optimal trajectories in three challenging motion planning scenarios: (i) a planar robot with a 4-D state space and double integrator dynamics, (ii) an aerial vehicle with a 10-D state space and linearized quadrotor dynamics, and (iii) a car-like robot with a 5-D state space and non-linear dynamics.

  • 2 authors
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May 22, 2012

Human2LocoMan: Learning Versatile Quadrupedal Manipulation with Human Pretraining

Quadrupedal robots have demonstrated impressive locomotion capabilities in complex environments, but equipping them with autonomous versatile manipulation skills in a scalable way remains a significant challenge. In this work, we introduce a cross-embodiment imitation learning system for quadrupedal manipulation, leveraging data collected from both humans and LocoMan, a quadruped equipped with multiple manipulation modes. Specifically, we develop a teleoperation and data collection pipeline, which unifies and modularizes the observation and action spaces of the human and the robot. To effectively leverage the collected data, we propose an efficient modularized architecture that supports co-training and pretraining on structured modality-aligned data across different embodiments. Additionally, we construct the first manipulation dataset for the LocoMan robot, covering various household tasks in both unimanual and bimanual modes, supplemented by a corresponding human dataset. We validate our system on six real-world manipulation tasks, where it achieves an average success rate improvement of 41.9% overall and 79.7% under out-of-distribution (OOD) settings compared to the baseline. Pretraining with human data contributes a 38.6% success rate improvement overall and 82.7% under OOD settings, enabling consistently better performance with only half the amount of robot data. Our code, hardware, and data are open-sourced at: https://human2bots.github.io.

  • 14 authors
·
Jun 19, 2025

Adversarial Locomotion and Motion Imitation for Humanoid Policy Learning

Humans exhibit diverse and expressive whole-body movements. However, attaining human-like whole-body coordination in humanoid robots remains challenging, as conventional approaches that mimic whole-body motions often neglect the distinct roles of upper and lower body. This oversight leads to computationally intensive policy learning and frequently causes robot instability and falls during real-world execution. To address these issues, we propose Adversarial Locomotion and Motion Imitation (ALMI), a novel framework that enables adversarial policy learning between upper and lower body. Specifically, the lower body aims to provide robust locomotion capabilities to follow velocity commands while the upper body tracks various motions. Conversely, the upper-body policy ensures effective motion tracking when the robot executes velocity-based movements. Through iterative updates, these policies achieve coordinated whole-body control, which can be extended to loco-manipulation tasks with teleoperation systems. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves robust locomotion and precise motion tracking in both simulation and on the full-size Unitree H1 robot. Additionally, we release a large-scale whole-body motion control dataset featuring high-quality episodic trajectories from MuJoCo simulations deployable on real robots. The project page is https://almi-humanoid.github.io.

  • 8 authors
·
Apr 19, 2025

Humanoid Agent via Embodied Chain-of-Action Reasoning with Multimodal Foundation Models for Zero-Shot Loco-Manipulation

Humanoid loco-manipulation, which integrates whole-body locomotion with dexterous manipulation, remains a fundamental challenge in robotics. Beyond whole-body coordination and balance, a central difficulty lies in understanding human instructions and translating them into coherent sequences of embodied actions. Recent advances in foundation models provide transferable multimodal representations and reasoning capabilities, yet existing efforts remain largely restricted to either locomotion or manipulation in isolation, with limited applicability to humanoid settings. In this paper, we propose Humanoid-COA, the first humanoid agent framework that integrates foundation model reasoning with an Embodied Chain-of-Action (CoA) mechanism for zero-shot loco-manipulation. Within the perception--reasoning--action paradigm, our key contribution lies in the reasoning stage, where the proposed CoA mechanism decomposes high-level human instructions into structured sequences of locomotion and manipulation primitives through affordance analysis, spatial inference, and whole-body action reasoning. Extensive experiments on two humanoid robots, Unitree H1-2 and G1, in both an open test area and an apartment environment, demonstrate that our framework substantially outperforms prior baselines across manipulation, locomotion, and loco-manipulation tasks, achieving robust generalization to long-horizon and unstructured scenarios. Project page: https://humanoid-coa.github.io/

  • 11 authors
·
Apr 13, 2025

Barkour: Benchmarking Animal-level Agility with Quadruped Robots

Animals have evolved various agile locomotion strategies, such as sprinting, leaping, and jumping. There is a growing interest in developing legged robots that move like their biological counterparts and show various agile skills to navigate complex environments quickly. Despite the interest, the field lacks systematic benchmarks to measure the performance of control policies and hardware in agility. We introduce the Barkour benchmark, an obstacle course to quantify agility for legged robots. Inspired by dog agility competitions, it consists of diverse obstacles and a time based scoring mechanism. This encourages researchers to develop controllers that not only move fast, but do so in a controllable and versatile way. To set strong baselines, we present two methods for tackling the benchmark. In the first approach, we train specialist locomotion skills using on-policy reinforcement learning methods and combine them with a high-level navigation controller. In the second approach, we distill the specialist skills into a Transformer-based generalist locomotion policy, named Locomotion-Transformer, that can handle various terrains and adjust the robot's gait based on the perceived environment and robot states. Using a custom-built quadruped robot, we demonstrate that our method can complete the course at half the speed of a dog. We hope that our work represents a step towards creating controllers that enable robots to reach animal-level agility.

  • 44 authors
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May 23, 2023

Rethinking the Embodied Gap in Vision-and-Language Navigation: A Holistic Study of Physical and Visual Disparities

Recent Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) advancements are promising, but their idealized assumptions about robot movement and control fail to reflect physically embodied deployment challenges. To bridge this gap, we introduce VLN-PE, a physically realistic VLN platform supporting humanoid, quadruped, and wheeled robots. For the first time, we systematically evaluate several ego-centric VLN methods in physical robotic settings across different technical pipelines, including classification models for single-step discrete action prediction, a diffusion model for dense waypoint prediction, and a train-free, map-based large language model (LLM) integrated with path planning. Our results reveal significant performance degradation due to limited robot observation space, environmental lighting variations, and physical challenges like collisions and falls. This also exposes locomotion constraints for legged robots in complex environments. VLN-PE is highly extensible, allowing seamless integration of new scenes beyond MP3D, thereby enabling more comprehensive VLN evaluation. Despite the weak generalization of current models in physical deployment, VLN-PE provides a new pathway for improving cross-embodiment's overall adaptability. We hope our findings and tools inspire the community to rethink VLN limitations and advance robust, practical VLN models. The code is available at https://crystalsixone.github.io/vln_pe.github.io/.

  • 9 authors
·
Jul 17, 2025

Emergent Dexterity via Diverse Resets and Large-Scale Reinforcement Learning

Reinforcement learning in massively parallel physics simulations has driven major progress in sim-to-real robot learning. However, current approaches remain brittle and task-specific, relying on extensive per-task engineering to design rewards, curricula, and demonstrations. Even with this engineering, they often fail on long-horizon, contact-rich manipulation tasks and do not meaningfully scale with compute, as performance quickly saturates when training revisits the same narrow regions of state space. We introduce OmniReset, a simple and scalable framework that enables on-policy reinforcement learning to robustly solve a broad class of dexterous manipulation tasks using a single reward function, fixed algorithm hyperparameters, no curricula, and no human demonstrations. Our key insight is that long-horizon exploration can be dramatically simplified by using simulator resets to systematically expose the RL algorithm to the diverse set of robot-object interactions which underlie dexterous manipulation. OmniReset programmatically generates such resets with minimal human input, converting additional compute directly into broader behavioral coverage and continued performance gains. We show that OmniReset gracefully scales to long-horizon dexterous manipulation tasks beyond the capabilities of existing approaches and is able to learn robust policies over significantly wider ranges of initial conditions than baselines. Finally, we distill OmniReset into visuomotor policies which display robust retrying behavior and substantially higher success rates than baselines when transferred to the real world zero-shot. Project webpage: https://omnireset.github.io

  • 12 authors
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Mar 16

SuperSuit: An Isomorphic Bimodal Interface for Scalable Mobile Manipulation

High-quality, long-horizon demonstrations are essential for embodied AI, yet acquiring such data for tightly coupled wheeled mobile manipulators remains a fundamental bottleneck. Unlike fixed-base systems, mobile manipulators require continuous coordination between SE(2) locomotion and precise manipulation, exposing limitations in existing teleoperation and wearable interfaces. We present SuperSuit, a bimodal data acquisition framework that supports both robot-in-the-loop teleoperation and active demonstration under a shared kinematic interface. Both modalities produce structurally identical joint-space trajectories, enabling direct data mixing without modifying downstream policies. For locomotion, SuperSuit maps natural human stepping to continuous planar base velocities, eliminating discrete command switches. For manipulation, it employs a strictly isomorphic wearable arm in both modes, while policy training is formulated in a shift-invariant delta-joint representation to mitigate calibration offsets and structural compliance without inverse kinematics. Real-world experiments on long-horizon mobile manipulation tasks show 2.6times higher demonstration throughput in active mode compared to a teleoperation baseline, comparable policy performance when substituting teleoperation data with active demonstrations at fixed dataset size, and monotonic performance improvement as active data volume increases. These results indicate that consistent kinematic representations across collection modalities enable scalable data acquisition for long-horizon mobile manipulation.

  • 6 authors
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Mar 5 1

Admissible Velocity Propagation : Beyond Quasi-Static Path Planning for High-Dimensional Robots

Path-velocity decomposition is an intuitive yet powerful approach to address the complexity of kinodynamic motion planning. The difficult trajectory planning problem is solved in two separate, simpler, steps: first, find a path in the configuration space that satisfies the geometric constraints (path planning), and second, find a time-parameterization of that path satisfying the kinodynamic constraints. A fundamental requirement is that the path found in the first step should be time-parameterizable. Most existing works fulfill this requirement by enforcing quasi-static constraints in the path planning step, resulting in an important loss in completeness. We propose a method that enables path-velocity decomposition to discover truly dynamic motions, i.e. motions that are not quasi-statically executable. At the heart of the proposed method is a new algorithm -- Admissible Velocity Propagation -- which, given a path and an interval of reachable velocities at the beginning of that path, computes exactly and efficiently the interval of all the velocities the system can reach after traversing the path while respecting the system kinodynamic constraints. Combining this algorithm with usual sampling-based planners then gives rise to a family of new trajectory planners that can appropriately handle kinodynamic constraints while retaining the advantages associated with path-velocity decomposition. We demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method on some difficult kinodynamic planning problems, where, in particular, quasi-static methods are guaranteed to fail.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 29, 2016

RoboForge: Physically Optimized Text-guided Whole-Body Locomotion for Humanoids

While generative models have become effective at producing human-like motions from text, transferring these motions to humanoid robots for physical execution remains challenging. Existing pipelines are often limited by retargeting, where kinematic quality is undermined by physical infeasibility, contact-transition errors, and the high cost of real-world dynamical data. We present a unified latent-driven framework that bridges natural language and whole-body humanoid locomotion through a retarget-free, physics-optimized pipeline. Rather than treating generation and control as separate stages, our key insight is to couple them bidirectionally under physical constraints.We introduce a Physical Plausibility Optimization (PP-Opt) module as the coupling interface. In the forward direction, PP-Opt refines a teacher-student distillation policy with a plausibility-centric reward to suppress artifacts such as floating, skating, and penetration. In the backward direction, it converts reward-optimized simulation rollouts into high-quality explicit motion data, which is used to fine-tune the motion generator toward a more physically plausible latent distribution. This bidirectional design forms a self-improving cycle: the generator learns a physically grounded latent space, while the controller learns to execute latent-conditioned behaviors with dynamical integrity.Extensive experiments on the Unitree G1 humanoid show that our bidirectional optimization improves tracking accuracy and success rates. Across IsaacLab and MuJoCo, the implicit latent-driven pipeline consistently outperforms conventional explicit retargeting baselines in both precision and stability. By coupling diffusion-based motion generation with physical plausibility optimization, our framework provides a practical path toward deployable text-guided humanoid intelligence.

  • 7 authors
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Mar 18

Bench-NPIN: Benchmarking Non-prehensile Interactive Navigation

Mobile robots are increasingly deployed in unstructured environments where obstacles and objects are movable. Navigation in such environments is known as interactive navigation, where task completion requires not only avoiding obstacles but also strategic interactions with movable objects. Non-prehensile interactive navigation focuses on non-grasping interaction strategies, such as pushing, rather than relying on prehensile manipulation. Despite a growing body of research in this field, most solutions are evaluated using case-specific setups, limiting reproducibility and cross-comparison. In this paper, we present Bench-NPIN, the first comprehensive benchmark for non-prehensile interactive navigation. Bench-NPIN includes multiple components: 1) a comprehensive range of simulated environments for non-prehensile interactive navigation tasks, including navigating a maze with movable obstacles, autonomous ship navigation in icy waters, box delivery, and area clearing, each with varying levels of complexity; 2) a set of evaluation metrics that capture unique aspects of interactive navigation, such as efficiency, interaction effort, and partial task completion; and 3) demonstrations using Bench-NPIN to evaluate example implementations of established baselines across environments. Bench-NPIN is an open-source Python library with a modular design. The code, documentation, and trained models can be found at https://github.com/IvanIZ/BenchNPIN.

  • 5 authors
·
May 17, 2025

CrossLoco: Human Motion Driven Control of Legged Robots via Guided Unsupervised Reinforcement Learning

Human motion driven control (HMDC) is an effective approach for generating natural and compelling robot motions while preserving high-level semantics. However, establishing the correspondence between humans and robots with different body structures is not straightforward due to the mismatches in kinematics and dynamics properties, which causes intrinsic ambiguity to the problem. Many previous algorithms approach this motion retargeting problem with unsupervised learning, which requires the prerequisite skill sets. However, it will be extremely costly to learn all the skills without understanding the given human motions, particularly for high-dimensional robots. In this work, we introduce CrossLoco, a guided unsupervised reinforcement learning framework that simultaneously learns robot skills and their correspondence to human motions. Our key innovation is to introduce a cycle-consistency-based reward term designed to maximize the mutual information between human motions and robot states. We demonstrate that the proposed framework can generate compelling robot motions by translating diverse human motions, such as running, hopping, and dancing. We quantitatively compare our CrossLoco against the manually engineered and unsupervised baseline algorithms along with the ablated versions of our framework and demonstrate that our method translates human motions with better accuracy, diversity, and user preference. We also showcase its utility in other applications, such as synthesizing robot movements from language input and enabling interactive robot control.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 29, 2023

Learned Perceptive Forward Dynamics Model for Safe and Platform-aware Robotic Navigation

Ensuring safe navigation in complex environments requires accurate real-time traversability assessment and understanding of environmental interactions relative to the robot`s capabilities. Traditional methods, which assume simplified dynamics, often require designing and tuning cost functions to safely guide paths or actions toward the goal. This process is tedious, environment-dependent, and not generalizable. To overcome these issues, we propose a novel learned perceptive Forward Dynamics Model (FDM) that predicts the robot`s future state conditioned on the surrounding geometry and history of proprioceptive measurements, proposing a more scalable, safer, and heuristic-free solution. The FDM is trained on multiple years of simulated navigation experience, including high-risk maneuvers, and real-world interactions to incorporate the full system dynamics beyond rigid body simulation. We integrate our perceptive FDM into a zero-shot Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) planning framework, leveraging the learned mapping between actions, future states, and failure probability. This allows for optimizing a simplified cost function, eliminating the need for extensive cost-tuning to ensure safety. On the legged robot ANYmal, the proposed perceptive FDM improves the position estimation by on average 41% over competitive baselines, which translates into a 27% higher navigation success rate in rough simulation environments. Moreover, we demonstrate effective sim-to-real transfer and showcase the benefit of training on synthetic and real data. Code and models are made publicly available under https://github.com/leggedrobotics/fdm.

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 27, 2025

SafeFlow: Real-Time Text-Driven Humanoid Whole-Body Control via Physics-Guided Rectified Flow and Selective Safety Gating

Recent advances in real-time interactive text-driven motion generation have enabled humanoids to perform diverse behaviors. However, kinematics-only generators often exhibit physical hallucinations, producing motion trajectories that are physically infeasible to track with a downstream motion tracking controller or unsafe for real-world deployment. These failures often arise from the lack of explicit physics-aware objectives for real-robot execution and become more severe under out-of-distribution (OOD) user inputs. Hence, we propose SafeFlow, a text-driven humanoid whole-body control framework that combines physics-guided motion generation with a 3-Stage Safety Gate driven by explicit risk indicators. SafeFlow adopts a two-level architecture. At the high level, we generate motion trajectories using Physics-Guided Rectified Flow Matching in a VAE latent space to improve real-robot executability, and further accelerate sampling via Reflow to reduce the number of function evaluations (NFE) for real-time control. The 3-Stage Safety Gate enables selective execution by detecting semantic OOD prompts using a Mahalanobis score in text-embedding space, filtering unstable generations via a directional sensitivity discrepancy metric, and enforcing final hard kinematic constraints such as joint and velocity limits before passing the generated trajectory to a low-level motion tracking controller. Extensive experiments on the Unitree G1 demonstrate that SafeFlow outperforms prior diffusion-based methods in success rate, physical compliance, and inference speed, while maintaining diverse expressiveness.

  • 4 authors
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Mar 25

ECO: Energy-Constrained Optimization with Reinforcement Learning for Humanoid Walking

Achieving stable and energy-efficient locomotion is essential for humanoid robots to operate continuously in real-world applications. Existing MPC and RL approaches often rely on energy-related metrics embedded within a multi-objective optimization framework, which require extensive hyperparameter tuning and often result in suboptimal policies. To address these challenges, we propose ECO (Energy-Constrained Optimization), a constrained RL framework that separates energy-related metrics from rewards, reformulating them as explicit inequality constraints. This method provides a clear and interpretable physical representation of energy costs, enabling more efficient and intuitive hyperparameter tuning for improved energy efficiency. ECO introduces dedicated constraints for energy consumption and reference motion, enforced by the Lagrangian method, to achieve stable, symmetric, and energy-efficient walking for humanoid robots. We evaluated ECO against MPC, standard RL with reward shaping, and four state-of-the-art constrained RL methods. Experiments, including sim-to-sim and sim-to-real transfers on the kid-sized humanoid robot BRUCE, demonstrate that ECO significantly reduces energy consumption compared to baselines while maintaining robust walking performance. These results highlight a substantial advancement in energy-efficient humanoid locomotion. All experimental demonstrations can be found on the project website: https://sites.google.com/view/eco-humanoid.

  • 9 authors
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Feb 6 2

Hybrid Systems Neural Control with Region-of-Attraction Planner

Hybrid systems are prevalent in robotics. However, ensuring the stability of hybrid systems is challenging due to sophisticated continuous and discrete dynamics. A system with all its system modes stable can still be unstable. Hence special treatments are required at mode switchings to stabilize the system. In this work, we propose a hierarchical, neural network (NN)-based method to control general hybrid systems. For each system mode, we first learn an NN Lyapunov function and an NN controller to ensure the states within the region of attraction (RoA) can be stabilized. Then an RoA NN estimator is learned across different modes. Upon mode switching, we propose a differentiable planner to ensure the states after switching can land in next mode's RoA, hence stabilizing the hybrid system. We provide novel theoretical stability guarantees and conduct experiments in car tracking control, pogobot navigation, and bipedal walker locomotion. Our method only requires 0.25X of the training time as needed by other learning-based methods. With low running time (10-50X faster than model predictive control (MPC)), our controller achieves a higher stability/success rate over other baselines such as MPC, reinforcement learning (RL), common Lyapunov methods (CLF), linear quadratic regulator (LQR), quadratic programming (QP) and Hamilton-Jacobian-based methods (HJB). The project page is on https://mit-realm.github.io/hybrid-clf.

  • 2 authors
·
Mar 18, 2023

OmniSSR: Zero-shot Omnidirectional Image Super-Resolution using Stable Diffusion Model

Omnidirectional images (ODIs) are commonly used in real-world visual tasks, and high-resolution ODIs help improve the performance of related visual tasks. Most existing super-resolution methods for ODIs use end-to-end learning strategies, resulting in inferior realness of generated images and a lack of effective out-of-domain generalization capabilities in training methods. Image generation methods represented by diffusion model provide strong priors for visual tasks and have been proven to be effectively applied to image restoration tasks. Leveraging the image priors of the Stable Diffusion (SD) model, we achieve omnidirectional image super-resolution with both fidelity and realness, dubbed as OmniSSR. Firstly, we transform the equirectangular projection (ERP) images into tangent projection (TP) images, whose distribution approximates the planar image domain. Then, we use SD to iteratively sample initial high-resolution results. At each denoising iteration, we further correct and update the initial results using the proposed Octadecaplex Tangent Information Interaction (OTII) and Gradient Decomposition (GD) technique to ensure better consistency. Finally, the TP images are transformed back to obtain the final high-resolution results. Our method is zero-shot, requiring no training or fine-tuning. Experiments of our method on two benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 16, 2024

NExT-OMNI: Towards Any-to-Any Omnimodal Foundation Models with Discrete Flow Matching

Next-generation multimodal foundation models capable of any-to-any cross-modal generation and multi-turn interaction will serve as core components of artificial general intelligence systems, playing a pivotal role in human-machine interaction. However, most existing multimodal models remain constrained by autoregressive architectures, whose inherent limitations prevent a balanced integration of understanding and generation capabilities. Although hybrid and decoupling strategies have been explored to address these tasks within unified frameworks separately, their redundant, non-integrated designs limit their applicability to broader scenarios, such as cross-modal retrieval. In this work, we introduce NExT-OMNI, an open-source omnimodal foundation model that achieves unified modeling through discrete flow paradigms. By leveraging metric-induced probability paths and kinetic optimal velocities, NExT-OMNI natively supports any-to-any understanding and generation with enhanced response efficiency, while enabling broader application scenarios through concise unified representations rather than task-decoupled designs. Trained on large-scale interleaved text, image, video, and audio data, NExT-OMNI delivers competitive performance on multimodal generation and understanding benchmarks, while outperforming prior unified models in multi-turn multimodal interaction and cross-modal retrieval, highlighting its architectural advantages as a next-generation multimodal foundation model. To advance further research, we release training details, data protocols, and open-source both the code and model checkpoints.

  • 8 authors
·
Oct 15, 2025

ARC-RL: A Reinforcement Learning Playground Inspired by ARC Raiders

Reinforcement learning for legged locomotion has matured into a stack of multi-component reward functions and physics-engine benchmarks whose morphologies are uniformly derived from real commercial hardware. Game NPCs, however, are bound by stylistic constraints absent from sim-to-real robotics and routinely take the form of creatures with no real-robot counterpart. We introduce ARC-RL, a suite of four MuJoCo continuous-control environments featuring robotic morphologies inspired by the bestiary of ARC Raiders: the 18-DoF tall hexapod Queen, the 12-DoF armoured hexapod Bastion, the 18-DoF compact hexapod Tick, and the 12-DoF quadruped Leaper. All four robots share a unified observation template, action convention, simulation cadence, and a single closed-form multi-component reward function whose only per-morphology variation lives in a small set of weights and parameters. The reward fuses a velocity-tracking tent, a healthy survive bonus, a phase-locked gait-compliance bonus/cost pair, action regularisers, three safety penalties, and a posture anchor; no motion-capture data enters the reward at any point. We additionally provide hand-crafted Central Pattern Generator demonstrators per morphology, which serve both as fixed expert references and as sources of prior data for offline-to-online training. On this playground, we conduct a controlled empirical study comparing standard online algorithms (SAC, SPEQ, SOPE-EO) and methods augmented with prior data (SACfD, SPEQ-O2O, SOPE), and characterise how each paradigm copes with the playground's morphological diversity and animation-style stylistic constraints. Source code is available at https://github.com/CarloRomeo427/ARC_RL.git.

  • 2 authors
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May 19

METRA: Scalable Unsupervised RL with Metric-Aware Abstraction

Unsupervised pre-training strategies have proven to be highly effective in natural language processing and computer vision. Likewise, unsupervised reinforcement learning (RL) holds the promise of discovering a variety of potentially useful behaviors that can accelerate the learning of a wide array of downstream tasks. Previous unsupervised RL approaches have mainly focused on pure exploration and mutual information skill learning. However, despite the previous attempts, making unsupervised RL truly scalable still remains a major open challenge: pure exploration approaches might struggle in complex environments with large state spaces, where covering every possible transition is infeasible, and mutual information skill learning approaches might completely fail to explore the environment due to the lack of incentives. To make unsupervised RL scalable to complex, high-dimensional environments, we propose a novel unsupervised RL objective, which we call Metric-Aware Abstraction (METRA). Our main idea is, instead of directly covering the entire state space, to only cover a compact latent space Z that is metrically connected to the state space S by temporal distances. By learning to move in every direction in the latent space, METRA obtains a tractable set of diverse behaviors that approximately cover the state space, being scalable to high-dimensional environments. Through our experiments in five locomotion and manipulation environments, we demonstrate that METRA can discover a variety of useful behaviors even in complex, pixel-based environments, being the first unsupervised RL method that discovers diverse locomotion behaviors in pixel-based Quadruped and Humanoid. Our code and videos are available at https://seohong.me/projects/metra/

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 13, 2023

4K4DGen: Panoramic 4D Generation at 4K Resolution

The blooming of virtual reality and augmented reality (VR/AR) technologies has driven an increasing demand for the creation of high-quality, immersive, and dynamic environments. However, existing generative techniques either focus solely on dynamic objects or perform outpainting from a single perspective image, failing to meet the needs of VR/AR applications. In this work, we tackle the challenging task of elevating a single panorama to an immersive 4D experience. For the first time, we demonstrate the capability to generate omnidirectional dynamic scenes with 360-degree views at 4K resolution, thereby providing an immersive user experience. Our method introduces a pipeline that facilitates natural scene animations and optimizes a set of 4D Gaussians using efficient splatting techniques for real-time exploration. To overcome the lack of scene-scale annotated 4D data and models, especially in panoramic formats, we propose a novel Panoramic Denoiser that adapts generic 2D diffusion priors to animate consistently in 360-degree images, transforming them into panoramic videos with dynamic scenes at targeted regions. Subsequently, we elevate the panoramic video into a 4D immersive environment while preserving spatial and temporal consistency. By transferring prior knowledge from 2D models in the perspective domain to the panoramic domain and the 4D lifting with spatial appearance and geometry regularization, we achieve high-quality Panorama-to-4D generation at a resolution of (4096 times 2048) for the first time. See the project website at https://4k4dgen.github.io.

  • 10 authors
·
Jun 19, 2024 1

WildLMa: Long Horizon Loco-Manipulation in the Wild

`In-the-wild' mobile manipulation aims to deploy robots in diverse real-world environments, which requires the robot to (1) have skills that generalize across object configurations; (2) be capable of long-horizon task execution in diverse environments; and (3) perform complex manipulation beyond pick-and-place. Quadruped robots with manipulators hold promise for extending the workspace and enabling robust locomotion, but existing results do not investigate such a capability. This paper proposes WildLMa with three components to address these issues: (1) adaptation of learned low-level controller for VR-enabled whole-body teleoperation and traversability; (2) WildLMa-Skill -- a library of generalizable visuomotor skills acquired via imitation learning or heuristics and (3) WildLMa-Planner -- an interface of learned skills that allow LLM planners to coordinate skills for long-horizon tasks. We demonstrate the importance of high-quality training data by achieving higher grasping success rate over existing RL baselines using only tens of demonstrations. WildLMa exploits CLIP for language-conditioned imitation learning that empirically generalizes to objects unseen in training demonstrations. Besides extensive quantitative evaluation, we qualitatively demonstrate practical robot applications, such as cleaning up trash in university hallways or outdoor terrains, operating articulated objects, and rearranging items on a bookshelf.

  • 11 authors
·
Nov 22, 2024 2

CTS: Concurrent Teacher-Student Reinforcement Learning for Legged Locomotion

Thanks to recent explosive developments of data-driven learning methodologies, reinforcement learning (RL) emerges as a promising solution to address the legged locomotion problem in robotics. In this paper, we propose CTS, a novel Concurrent Teacher-Student reinforcement learning architecture for legged locomotion over uneven terrains. Different from conventional teacher-student architecture that trains the teacher policy via RL first and then transfers the knowledge to the student policy through supervised learning, our proposed architecture trains teacher and student policy networks concurrently under the reinforcement learning paradigm. To this end, we develop a new training scheme based on a modified proximal policy gradient (PPO) method that exploits data samples collected from the interactions between both the teacher and the student policies with the environment. The effectiveness of the proposed architecture and the new training scheme is demonstrated through substantial quantitative simulation comparisons with the state-of-the-art approaches and extensive indoor and outdoor experiments with quadrupedal and point-foot bipedal robot platforms, showcasing robust and agile locomotion capability. Quantitative simulation comparisons show that our approach reduces the average velocity tracking error by up to 20% compared to the two-stage teacher-student, demonstrating significant superiority in addressing blind locomotion tasks. Videos are available at https://clearlab-sustech.github.io/concurrentTS.

  • 4 authors
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Aug 31, 2024

FALCON: Learning Force-Adaptive Humanoid Loco-Manipulation

Humanoid loco-manipulation holds transformative potential for daily service and industrial tasks, yet achieving precise, robust whole-body control with 3D end-effector force interaction remains a major challenge. Prior approaches are often limited to lightweight tasks or quadrupedal/wheeled platforms. To overcome these limitations, we propose FALCON, a dual-agent reinforcement-learning-based framework for robust force-adaptive humanoid loco-manipulation. FALCON decomposes whole-body control into two specialized agents: (1) a lower-body agent ensuring stable locomotion under external force disturbances, and (2) an upper-body agent precisely tracking end-effector positions with implicit adaptive force compensation. These two agents are jointly trained in simulation with a force curriculum that progressively escalates the magnitude of external force exerted on the end effector while respecting torque limits. Experiments demonstrate that, compared to the baselines, FALCON achieves 2x more accurate upper-body joint tracking, while maintaining robust locomotion under force disturbances and achieving faster training convergence. Moreover, FALCON enables policy training without embodiment-specific reward or curriculum tuning. Using the same training setup, we obtain policies that are deployed across multiple humanoids, enabling forceful loco-manipulation tasks such as transporting payloads (0-20N force), cart-pulling (0-100N), and door-opening (0-40N) in the real world.

  • 10 authors
·
May 10, 2025

HERMES: Human-to-Robot Embodied Learning from Multi-Source Motion Data for Mobile Dexterous Manipulation

Leveraging human motion data to impart robots with versatile manipulation skills has emerged as a promising paradigm in robotic manipulation. Nevertheless, translating multi-source human hand motions into feasible robot behaviors remains challenging, particularly for robots equipped with multi-fingered dexterous hands characterized by complex, high-dimensional action spaces. Moreover, existing approaches often struggle to produce policies capable of adapting to diverse environmental conditions. In this paper, we introduce HERMES, a human-to-robot learning framework for mobile bimanual dexterous manipulation. First, HERMES formulates a unified reinforcement learning approach capable of seamlessly transforming heterogeneous human hand motions from multiple sources into physically plausible robotic behaviors. Subsequently, to mitigate the sim2real gap, we devise an end-to-end, depth image-based sim2real transfer method for improved generalization to real-world scenarios. Furthermore, to enable autonomous operation in varied and unstructured environments, we augment the navigation foundation model with a closed-loop Perspective-n-Point (PnP) localization mechanism, ensuring precise alignment of visual goals and effectively bridging autonomous navigation and dexterous manipulation. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that HERMES consistently exhibits generalizable behaviors across diverse, in-the-wild scenarios, successfully performing numerous complex mobile bimanual dexterous manipulation tasks. Project Page:https://gemcollector.github.io/HERMES/.

  • 7 authors
·
Aug 27, 2025 2

Heracles: Bridging Precise Tracking and Generative Synthesis for General Humanoid Control

Achieving general-purpose humanoid control requires a delicate balance between the precise execution of commanded motions and the flexible, anthropomorphic adaptability needed to recover from unpredictable environmental perturbations. Current general controllers predominantly formulate motion control as a rigid reference-tracking problem. While effective in nominal conditions, these trackers often exhibit brittle, non-anthropomorphic failure modes under severe disturbances, lacking the generative adaptability inherent to human motor control. To overcome this limitation, we propose Heracles, a novel state-conditioned diffusion middleware that bridges precise motion tracking and generative synthesis. Rather than relying on rigid tracking paradigms or complex explicit mode-switching, Heracles operates as an intermediary layer between high-level reference motions and low-level physics trackers. By conditioning on the robot's real-time state, the diffusion model implicitly adapts its behavior: it approximates an identity map when the state closely aligns with the reference, preserving zero-shot tracking fidelity. Conversely, when encountering significant state deviations, it seamlessly transitions into a generative synthesizer to produce natural, anthropomorphic recovery trajectories. Our framework demonstrates that integrating generative priors into the control loop not only significantly enhances robustness against extreme perturbations but also elevates humanoid control from a rigid tracking paradigm to an open-ended, generative general-purpose architecture.

  • 16 authors
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Mar 30

TIMotion: Temporal and Interactive Framework for Efficient Human-Human Motion Generation

Human-human motion generation is essential for understanding humans as social beings. Current methods fall into two main categories: single-person-based methods and separate modeling-based methods. To delve into this field, we abstract the overall generation process into a general framework MetaMotion, which consists of two phases: temporal modeling and interaction mixing. For temporal modeling, the single-person-based methods concatenate two people into a single one directly, while the separate modeling-based methods skip the modeling of interaction sequences. The inadequate modeling described above resulted in sub-optimal performance and redundant model parameters. In this paper, we introduce TIMotion (Temporal and Interactive Modeling), an efficient and effective framework for human-human motion generation. Specifically, we first propose Causal Interactive Injection to model two separate sequences as a causal sequence leveraging the temporal and causal properties. Then we present Role-Evolving Scanning to adjust to the change in the active and passive roles throughout the interaction. Finally, to generate smoother and more rational motion, we design Localized Pattern Amplification to capture short-term motion patterns. Extensive experiments on InterHuman and InterX demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance. Project page: https://aigc-explorer.github.io/TIMotion-page/

  • 7 authors
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Aug 30, 2024

X-OmniClaw Technical Report: A Unified Mobile Agent for Multimodal Understanding and Interaction

Inspired by the development of OpenClaw, there is a growing demand for mobile-based personal agents capable of handling complex and intuitive interactions. In this technical report, we introduce X-OmniClaw, a unified mobile agent designed for multimodal understanding and interaction in the Android ecosystem. This unified architecture of perception, memory, and action enables the agent to handle complex mobile tasks with high contextual awareness. Specifically, Omni Perception provides a unified multimodal ingress pipeline that integrates UI states, real-world visual contexts, and speech inputs, leveraging a temporal alignment module to decompose raw data into structured multimodal intent representations. Omni Memory leverages multimodal memory optimization to enhance personalized intelligence by integrating runtime working memory for task continuity with long-term personal memory distilled from local data, enabling highly context-aware and personalized interactions. Finally, Omni Action employs a hybrid grounding strategy that combines structural XML metadata with visual perception for robust interaction. Through Behavior Cloning and Trajectory Replay, the system captures user navigation as reusable skills, enabling precise direct-access execution. Demonstrations across diverse scenarios show that X-OmniClaw effectively enhances interaction efficiency and task reliability, providing a practical architectural blueprint for the next generation of mobile-native personal assistants.

OppoAI Oppo
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May 6 3

OrthoPhys: Physically Plausible Video Generation with Orthogonal-View Geometry Guidance

Recent progress in video generation has led to substantial improvements in visual fidelity, yet ensuring physically consistent motion remains a fundamental challenge. Intuitively, this limitation can be attributed to the fact that real-world object motion unfolds in three-dimensional space, while video observations provide only partial, view-dependent projections of such dynamics. To address these issues, we propose OrthoPhys, a two-stage framework that leverages orthogonal-view geometry guidance to enforce physical plausibility. Instead of directly generating unstructured 2D videos, our first stage generates synchronized, four-view orthogonal videos of the foreground dynamics. By incorporating a geometry-enhanced attention mechanism across these orthogonal views, this stage effectively enforces 3D spatial coherence and implicitly grounds the motion in physical attributes. In the second stage, these physically consistent orthogonal foregrounds serve as rigid guidance to synthesize the final complete video, seamlessly learning the interaction between foreground dynamics and the background context. To support this orthogonal-view training paradigm, we construct PhysMV, a dataset containing 40K scenes, each consisting of four orthogonal viewpoints, resulting in a total of 160K video sequences. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OrthoPhys significantly improves physical realism and spatial-temporal coherence over existing video generation methods. Project page: https://anonymous.4open.science/w/Phys4D/.

  • 7 authors
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May 24