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.

Benchmarking SLAM Algorithms in the Cloud: The SLAM Hive System

Evaluating the performance of Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) algorithms is essential for scientists and users of robotic systems alike. But there are a multitude different permutations of possible options of hardware setups and algorithm configurations, as well as different datasets and algorithms, such that it is infeasible to thoroughly compare SLAM systems against the full state of the art. To solve that we present the SLAM Hive Benchmarking Suite, which is able to analyze SLAM algorithms in thousands of mapping runs, through its utilization of container technology and deployment in the cloud. This paper presents the architecture and open source implementation of SLAM Hive and compares it to existing efforts on SLAM evaluation. We perform mapping runs of many of the most popular visual and LiDAR based SLAM algorithms against commonly used datasets and show how SLAM Hive and then be used to conveniently analyze the results against various aspects. Through this we envision that SLAM Hive can become an essential tool for proper comparisons and evaluations of SLAM algorithms and thus drive the scientific development in the research on SLAM. The open source software as well as a demo to show the live analysis of 100s of mapping runs can be found on our SLAM Hive website.