Humanoid Whole-Body Badminton via Multi-Stage Reinforcement Learning

TL;DR

This paper introduces a reinforcement learning pipeline for humanoid robots to perform dynamic badminton strikes, achieving high shuttle speeds and successful rallies in simulation and real-world tests.

Contribution

It presents a novel multi-stage reinforcement learning approach for whole-body control in humanoid badminton without relying on motion priors or expert demonstrations.

Findings

Robots sustain 21 consecutive hits in simulation.

Real-world tests reach shuttle speeds up to 19.1 m/s.

Prediction-free approach performs comparably to EKF-based method.

Abstract

Humanoid robots have demonstrated strong capabilities for interacting with static scenes across locomotion and manipulation, yet dynamic real-world interactions remain challenging. As a step toward fast-moving object interactions, we present a reinforcement-learning training pipeline that yields a unified whole-body controller for humanoid badminton, coordinating footwork and striking without motion priors or expert demonstrations. Training follows a three-stage curriculum (footwork acquisition, precision-guided swing generation, and task-focused refinement) so legs and arms jointly serve the hitting objective. For deployment, we use an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) to estimate and predict shuttlecock trajectories for target striking, and also develop a prediction-free variant that removes the EKF and explicit prediction. We validate the framework with five sets of experiments in simulation and on hardware. In simulation, two robots sustain a rally of 21 consecutive hits. In real-world tests with both machine-fed shuttles and human-robot rallies, the robot achieves outgoing shuttle speeds up to 19.1~m/s with a mean return landing distance of 4~m. Moreover, the prediction-free variant attains comparable performance to the EKF-based target-known policy. Overall, our approach enables dynamic yet precise goal striking in humanoid badminton and suggests a path toward more dynamics-critical whole-body interaction tasks.