KungfuBot: Physics-Based Humanoid Whole-Body Control for Learning Highly-Dynamic Skills

Xuelong Li (China Telecom) · Weinan Zhang (Shanghai Jiao Tong University) · Chenjia Bai (Institute of AI (TeleAI), China Telecom) · Weiji Xie (Shanghai Jiao Tong University) · Jinrui Han (Shanghai Jiaotong University) · Jiakun Zheng (East China University of Science and Technology) · Huanyu Li (Harbin Institute of Technology) · Xinzhe Liu (Institute of Artificial Intelligence (TeleAI), China Telecom) · Jiyuan Shi (TeleAI)
adaptive motion trackingasymmetric actor-criticbi-level optimizationcurriculum mechanismdynamic behaviorsexpressive behaviorshumanoid robotsmotion imitationmotion processingphysical constraintspolicy trainingrobotics deploymenttracking accuracy tolerancetracking errorswhole-body control

Humanoid robots are promising to acquire various skills by imitating human behaviors. However, existing algorithms are only capable of tracking smooth, low-speed human motions, even with delicate reward and curriculum design. This paper presents a physics-based humanoid control framework, aiming to master highly-dynamic human behaviors such as Kungfu and dancing through multi-steps motion processing and adaptive motion tracking. For motion processing, we design a pipeline to extract, filter out, correct, and retarget motions, while ensuring compliance with physical constraints to the maximum extent. For motion imitation, we formulate a bi-level optimization problem to dynamically adjust the tracking accuracy tolerance based on the current tracking error, creating an adaptive curriculum mechanism. We further construct an asymmetric actor-critic framework for policy training. In experiments, we train whole-body control policies to imitate a set of highly dynamic motions. Our method achieves significantly lower tracking errors than existing approaches and is successfully deployed on the Unitree G1 robot, demonstrating stable and expressive behaviors. The project page is https://kungfubot.github.io.