Real-world humanoid locomotion with reinforcement learning

Humanoid robots that can autonomously operate in diverse environments have the potential to help address labor shortages in factories, assist elderly at home, and colonize new planets. Although classical controllers for humanoid robots have shown impressive results in a number of settings, they are challenging to generalize and adapt to new environments. Here, we present a fully learning-based approach for real-world humanoid locomotion. Our controller is a causal transformer that takes the history of proprioceptive observations and actions as input and predicts the next action. We hypothesized that the observation-action history contains useful information about the world that a powerful transformer model can…