Push the Limit: Learning High-Speed Sprinting and Aggressive Cornering on a Full-Scale Humanoid
cs.RO
Submitted: 2026-10-10
Updated: 2026-10-10
Comments: Accepted to the 10th Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL 2026). 16 pages, 5 figures, 7 tables. Video: https://youtu.be/YWf62XkiApc
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: We present a learning-based framework that enables a full-scale bipedal humanoid to sprint at over 7 m/s with motion-prior-guided gait and perform aggressive cornering at high speed with a pronounced
Abstract
We present a learning-based framework that enables a full-scale bipedal humanoid to sprint at over 7 m/s with motion-prior-guided gait and perform aggressive cornering at high speed with a pronounced trunk lean of up to 25. Achieving this combination is challenging: above approximately 4 m/s, periodic foot impacts induce severe, high-frequency yaw-rate oscillations intrinsic to high-speed gaits. This high-frequency temporal structure corrupts the history of proprioceptive feedback that flat-MLP policies rely on, while rendering conventional yaw-rate tracking rewards counterproductive, as they fight against the robot's natural oscillatory dynamics. Moreover, a single style prior shared across skills cannot tell which skill is commanded and inherently compromises the low-speed skill fidelity. To overcome these limitations, we adopt a causal multi-head attention (MHA) module to explicitly model the high-frequency temporal feedback. In place of the oscillatory yaw rate, we design a heading-direction reward that supervises only the low-frequency velocity direction, allowing agile turning at high speed without suppressing natural gait oscillations. We further introduce skill-conditioned multi-adversarial-motion-prior (MAMP) discriminators that condition the style reward on the commanded skill. Ablation experiments confirm that each mechanism is essential: replacing structured temporal encoding with a flat-history MLP caps the top speed; reverting to yaw-rate tracking prevents high-speed turning; and a single shared discriminator makes in-place turning collapse into a quasi-static stance. Our framework bridges the gap between raw sprinting speed and reference-motion fidelity, demonstrating stable high-speed sprinting and aggressive cornering in both simulation and real-robot deployment.
Sources
- Adversarial Motion Priors Make Good Substitutes for Complex Reward Functions
- Advanced Skills through Multiple Adversarial Motion Priors in Reinforcement Learning
- Learning to Walk in Minutes Using Massively Parallel Deep Reinforcement Learning
- Hybrid Internal Model: Learning Agile Legged Locomotion with Simulated Robot Response
- Decision Transformer: Reinforcement Learning via Sequence Modeling
- Body Transformer: Leveraging Robot Embodiment for Policy Learning
- Sim-to-Real Learning of All Common Bipedal Gaits via Periodic Reward Composition
- Rapid Locomotion via Reinforcement Learning
- Expressive Whole-Body Control for Humanoid Robots
- HumanPlus: Humanoid Shadowing and Imitation from Humans
- Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms
- High-Dimensional Continuous Control Using Generalized Advantage Estimation
- Domain Randomization for Transferring Deep Neural Networks from Simulation to the Real World
- Retargeting Matters: General Motion Retargeting for Humanoid Motion Tracking
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