Let Humanoids Hike! Integrative Skill Development on Complex Trails

TL;DR

This paper introduces LEGO-H, a comprehensive learning framework enabling humanoid robots to autonomously hike complex trails by integrating perception, decision-making, and motor skills, advancing embodied autonomy research.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel hierarchical reinforcement learning approach with vision transformers and latent movement representations for integrated trail hiking in humanoids.

Findings

LEGO-H demonstrates robustness across diverse simulated trails.

The framework effectively transfers policies from training to real-world scenarios.

Humanoids achieve adaptive, goal-directed navigation on complex terrains.

Abstract

Hiking on complex trails demands balance, agility, and adaptive decision-making over unpredictable terrain. Current humanoid research remains fragmented and inadequate for hiking: locomotion focuses on motor skills without long-term goals or situational awareness, while semantic navigation overlooks real-world embodiment and local terrain variability. We propose training humanoids to hike on complex trails, driving integrative skill development across visual perception, decision making, and motor execution. We develop a learning framework, LEGO-H, that enables a vision-equipped humanoid robot to hike complex trails autonomously. We introduce two technical innovations: 1) A temporal vision transformer variant - tailored into Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning framework - anticipates future local goals to guide movement, seamlessly integrating locomotion with goal-directed navigation. 2) Latent representations of joint movement patterns, combined with hierarchical metric learning - enhance Privileged Learning scheme - enable smooth policy transfer from privileged training to onboard execution. These components allow LEGO-H to handle diverse physical and environmental challenges without relying on predefined motion patterns. Experiments across varied simulated trails and robot morphologies highlight LEGO-H's versatility and robustness, positioning hiking as a compelling testbed for embodied autonomy and LEGO-H as a baseline for future humanoid development.