Learning Vision-Driven Reactive Soccer Skills for Humanoid Robots

Humanoid soccer poses a representative challenge for embodied intelligence, requiring robots to operate within a tightly coupled perception-action loop. However, existing systems typically rely on decoupled modules, resulting in delayed responses and incoherent behaviors in dynamic environments, while real-world perceptual limitations further exacerbate these issues. In this work, we present a unified reinforcement learning-based controller that enables humanoid robots to acquire reactive soccer skills through the direct integration of visual perception and motion control. Our approach extends Adversarial Motion Priors to perceptual settings in real-world dynamic environments, bridging motion imitation and visually grounded dynamic control. We introduce an encoder-decoder architecture combined with a virtual perception system that models real-world visual characteristics, allowing the policy to recover privileged states from imperfect observations and establish active coordination between perception and action. The resulting controller demonstrates strong reactivity, consistently executing coherent and robust soccer behaviors across various scenarios, including real RoboCup matches.

HiFAR: Multi-Stage Curriculum Learning for High-Dynamics Humanoid Fall Recovery

Humanoid robots encounter considerable difficulties in autonomously recovering from falls, especially within dynamic and unstructured environments. Conventional control methodologies are often inadequate in addressing the complexities associated with high-dimensional dynamics and the contact-rich nature of fall recovery. Meanwhile, reinforcement learning techniques are hindered by issues related to sparse rewards, intricate collision scenarios, and discrepancies between simulation and real-world applications. In this study, we introduce a multi-stage curriculum learning framework, termed HiFAR. This framework employs a staged learning approach that progressively incorporates increasingly complex and high-dimensional recovery tasks, thereby facilitating the robot's acquisition of efficient and stable fall recovery strategies. Furthermore, it enables the robot to adapt its policy to effectively manage real-world fall incidents. We assess the efficacy of the proposed method using a real humanoid robot, showcasing its capability to autonomously recover from a diverse range of falls with high success rates, rapid recovery times, robustness, and generalization.