HybridMimic: Hybrid RL-Centroidal Control for Humanoid Motion Mimicking

TL;DR

HybridMimic combines reinforcement learning with centroidal dynamics to produce physically feasible humanoid motions, improving robustness and accuracy in real-world environments.

Contribution

It introduces a dynamic contact prediction framework that integrates model-based control with learned policies for more versatile humanoid motion mimicry.

Findings

Reduces base position tracking error by 13% on hardware.

Demonstrates robustness under domain shifts.

Effectively combines RL with centroidal control.

Abstract

Motion mimicking, i.e., encouraging the control policy to mimic human motion, facilitates the learning of complex tasks via reinforcement learning (RL) for humanoid robots. Although standard RL frameworks demonstrate impressive locomotion agility, they often bypass explicit reasoning about robot dynamics during deployment, which is a design choice that can lead to physically infeasible commands when the robot encounters out-of-distribution environments. By integrating model-based principles, hybrid approaches can improve performance; however, existing methods typically rely on predefined contact timing, limiting their versatility. This paper introduces HybridMimic, a framework in which a learned policy dynamically modulates a centroidal-model-based controller by predicting continuous contact states and desired centroidal velocities. This architecture exploits the physical grounding of centroidal dynamics to generate feedforward torques that remain feasible even under domain shift. Using physics-informed rewards, the policy is trained to efficiently utilize the centroidal controller's optimization by outputting precise control targets and reference torques. Through hardware experiments on the Booster T1 humanoid, HybridMimic reduces the average base position tracking error by 13\% compared to a state-of-the-art RL baseline, demonstrating the robustness of dynamics-aware deployment.