Now You See That: Learning End-to-End Humanoid Locomotion from Raw Pixels

Achieving robust vision-based humanoid locomotion remains challenging due to two fundamental issues: the sim-to-real gap introduces significant perception noise that degrades performance on fine-grained tasks, and training a unified policy across diverse terrains is hindered by conflicting learning objectives. To address these challenges, we present an end-to-end framework for vision-driven humanoid locomotion. For robust sim-to-real transfer, we develop a high-fidelity depth sensor simulation that captures stereo matching artifacts and calibration uncertainties inherent in real-world sensing. We further propose a vision-aware behavior distillation approach that combines latent space alignment with noise-invariant auxiliary tasks, enabling effective knowledge transfer from privileged height maps to noisy depth observations. For versatile terrain adaptation, we introduce terrain-specific reward shaping integrated with multi-critic and multi-discriminator learning, where dedicated networks capture the distinct dynamics and motion priors of each terrain type. We validate our approach on two humanoid platforms equipped with different stereo depth cameras. The resulting policy demonstrates robust performance across diverse environments, seamlessly handling extreme challenges such as high platforms and wide gaps, as well as fine-grained tasks including bidirectional long-term staircase traversal.

Learning Humanoid Locomotion with World Model Reconstruction

Humanoid robots are designed to navigate environments accessible to humans using their legs. However, classical research has primarily focused on controlled laboratory settings, resulting in a gap in developing controllers for navigating complex real-world terrains. This challenge mainly arises from the limitations and noise in sensor data, which hinder the robot's understanding of itself and the environment. In this study, we introduce World Model Reconstruction (WMR), an end-to-end learning-based approach for blind humanoid locomotion across challenging terrains. We propose training an estimator to explicitly reconstruct the world state and utilize it to enhance the locomotion policy. The locomotion policy takes inputs entirely from the reconstructed information. The policy and the estimator are trained jointly; however, the gradient between them is intentionally cut off. This ensures that the estimator focuses solely on world reconstruction, independent of the locomotion policy's updates. We evaluated our model on rough, deformable, and slippery surfaces in real-world scenarios, demonstrating robust adaptability and resistance to interference. The robot successfully completed a 3.2 km hike without any human assistance, mastering terrains covered with ice and snow.