arXiv Machine Learning

Comparative Study on Agility, Efficiency, and Impact Absorption of Bipedal Robots with Active Toes

arXiv:2606. 19699v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Human legs exhibit high efficiency, agility, and impact absorption, with toes playing a crucial role in these capabilities.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 21

Beyond Kinematics: Benchmarking Simulation Fidelity for Muscle-Driven Imitation Learning

The paper compares two leading motion‑imitation reinforcement learning pipelines—HyFyDy, which uses detailed musculotendon modeling, and MuJoCo, which focuses on computational speed. Using the same human motion‑capture and EMG data, both pipelines reproduce kinematics similarly, but HyFyDy’s muscle activation predictions align more closely with experimental EMG (RMSE 0.164, r = 0.4) than MuJoCo’s (RMSE 0.344, r = 0.11). The authors conclude that HyFyDy’s higher physiological realism makes it currently more suitable for musculoskeletal modeling, though both systems need further development for GPU‑parallelizable environments and robotic assistive‑device design.

By Ayah G. Ahmad, Claire E. Borden, Maegan Tucker
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 11

Reflex-Informed Neuromuscular Reinforcement Learning for Muscle-Driven Locomotion

The paper introduces a Reflex-Informed Neuromuscular Reinforcement Learning framework for muscle-driven locomotion. It combines a fixed phase-dependent reflex controller with a reinforcement learning policy that adjusts reflex gains and thresholds for hip swing, knee support, and ankle propulsion. Experiments show the method produces physiologically plausible walking with improved kinematic accuracy, dynamic consistency, symmetry, and stride consistency, and remains robust to muscle weakness and perturbations without retraining.

By Jian Zhou, Xingyu Zhang, Rui Ma, Yu Cao, Shane Xie, Zhi-qiang Zhang
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 6

Imitation Learning from Human Motion Alone Does Not Guarantee Biomechanically Plausible Gait Kinetics

arXiv:2603. 12408v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Motion imitation learning (IL) is increasingly used in robotics and human gait modeling, yet its ability to recover biomechanically consistent joint moments without explicit kinetic information remains unclear.

By Xinyi Liu, Jangwhan Ahn, Edgar Lobaton, Jennie Si, He Huang
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 18

OmniMimic: Dynamics-completed Motion Augmentation for Multi-style Omnidirectional Quadruped Locomotion

OmniMimic is a training framework that expands limited animal demonstration data into a single multi‑gait policy for omnidirectional quadruped locomotion. It uses temporal reversal, constrained dynamics completion, and sagittal reflection to generate kinematic and physical supervision beyond the observed directions, then progressively expands command ranges and employs a shared actor with soft‑gated gait‑specialized residual experts. In simulation, OmniMimic improves foot‑position accuracy by 12.9% and velocity‑tracking error by 63.1% over the APEX baseline across four gaits.

By Sheng Wu, Guoqiang Zhao, Zhe Yang, Fei Teng, Zhikun Zhou, Yanlin Yang, Zheng Fang, Hong Zheng, Yaonan Wang, Kailun Yang
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 16

LoComposition: Terrain-Adaptive Energy-Efficient Quadruped Locomotion without Gait Priors

arXiv:2606. 15896v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Learning-based quadrupedal locomotion typically relies on complex reward formulations that entangle task specification, operational limits, gait preference, and terrain adaptation within a single optimization objective.

By Loukas Kordos, Leonard T. Franz, Simon Rappenecker, Oliver Hausdoerfer, Angela P. Schoellig, Pavel Kolev, Georg Martius
arXiv AI
Jun 10

RoboNaldo: Accurate, Stable and Powerful Humanoid Soccer Shooting via Motion-Guided Curriculum Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606. 11092v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Elite humanoid soccer shooting requires whole-body stability, high-impulse whole-body interactions, and accuracy to targets.

By Yichao Zhong, Yidan Lu, Yuhang Lu, Tianyang Tang, Haoguang Mai, Yixuan Pan, Tianyu Li, Li Chen, Jingbo Wang, Zhongyu Li, Peng Lu, Hongyang Li