Watch Your Step: Anticipated Perception for Humanoid Locomotion

The paper proposes a lightweight foothold prediction model (FPM) that anticipates future foot placements using only proprioception and velocity commands, allowing the robot to sample elevation maps only around predicted footholds. This preprocessing reduces redundant sensory input, enabling the locomotion policy to learn faster—reaching a given terrain difficulty in about one‑third the training iterations compared to using the full elevation map. The resulting policy outperforms both full‑map and attention‑based encoders on sparse foothold scenarios, and it zero‑shot transfers to a Unitree G1 humanoid across diverse indoor and outdoor obstacles.