epilectrik
/
unitree-g1
1
0
Fork 0
Code Issues Pull Requests Projects Releases Wiki Activity
You can not select more than 25 topics Topics must start with a letter or number, can include dashes ('-') and can be up to 35 characters long.
3 Commits
1 Branch
0 Tags
327 KiB
 
 
Tree: 36a93e0e3a
Branches Tags
${ item.name }
Create tag ${ searchTerm }
Create branch ${ searchTerm }
from '36a93e0e3a'
${ noResults }
unitree-g1/reference/sources/paper-softa.md

3.2 KiB
Raw Blame History

Hold My Beer: Learning Gentle Humanoid Locomotion and End-Effector Stabilization Control

arXiv: 2505.24198 Authors: Yitang Li, Yuanhang Zhang, Wenli Xiao, Chaoyi Pan, Haoyang Weng, Guanqi He, Tairan He, Guanya Shi Fetched: 2026-02-13 Type: Research Paper

Abstract

Can your humanoid walk up and hand you a full cup of beer, without spilling a drop? While humanoids are increasingly featured in flashy demos like dancing, delivering packages, traversing rough terrain, fine-grained control during locomotion remains a significant challenge. In particular, stabilizing a filled end-effector (EE) while walking is far from solved, due to a fundamental mismatch in task dynamics: locomotion demands slow-timescale, robust control, whereas EE stabilization requires rapid, high-precision corrections. To address this, we propose SoFTA, a Slow-Fast Two-Agent framework that decouples upper-body and lower-body control into separate agents operating at different frequencies and with distinct rewards. This temporal and objective separation mitigates policy interference and enables coordinated whole-body behavior. SoFTA executes upper-body actions at 100 Hz for precise EE control and lower-body actions at 50 Hz for robust gait. It reduces EE acceleration by 2-5x relative to baselines and performs much closer to human-level stability, enabling delicate tasks such as carrying nearly full cups, capturing steady video during locomotion, and disturbance rejection with EE stability.

Key Contributions

  • Slow-Fast Two-Agent (SoFTA) framework: Decouples upper-body and lower-body control into separate RL agents with different operating frequencies and distinct reward structures
  • Multi-frequency control: Upper-body agent operates at 100 Hz for precise end-effector control; lower-body agent operates at 50 Hz for robust gait generation
  • Significant performance gains: Achieves 2-5x reduction in end-effector acceleration compared to baseline whole-body control approaches
  • Near-human-level stability: Performs much closer to human-level end-effector stability during locomotion
  • Practical task demonstrations: Enables carrying nearly full cups without spilling, capturing steady video during walking, and maintaining EE stability under external disturbances
  • Addresses fundamental control mismatch: Resolves the conflicting dynamics between slow-timescale locomotion and fast-timescale end-effector stabilization through temporal and objective separation

G1 Relevance

SoFTA is directly deployed and validated on the Unitree G1 humanoid robot (alongside the Booster T1). This makes it one of the most immediately applicable papers for G1 whole-body control. The dual-agent architecture with multi-frequency control is particularly relevant for G1 tasks that require simultaneous locomotion and manipulation — such as carrying objects, serving items, or maintaining stable tool use while walking. The framework comes from the same LeCAR Lab at CMU that produced H2O and OmniH2O, demonstrating a consistent research pipeline targeting the G1 platform.

References