RobotDancing: Residual-Action Reinforcement Learning Enables Robust Long-Horizon Humanoid Motion Tracking

Abstract:Long-horizon, high-dynamic motion tracking on humanoids remains brittle: retargeted reference motions are typically kinematically plausible but dynamically inconsistent with the robot, so small tracking errors accumulate and eventually destabilize control. We present RobotDancing, a practical single-stage reinforcement learning recipe that tracks retargeted motions by predicting reference-conditioned residual joint targets. By parameterizing actions as residual corrections on top of the reference, the policy can focus on compensating reference--robot dynamics mismatch (e.g., actuation limits, latency, friction, inertia) rather than re-synthesizing the motion. We train one policy per reference sequence while reusing a common training and deployment recipe across motions and platforms. We evaluate RobotDancing on eight LAFAN1 dance motions on Unitree G1 and conduct cross-platform experiments on H1 and H1-2. The resulting G1 policies execute long-horizon, high-energy behaviors on hardware without test-time modifications, and qualitative H1/H1-2 clips further illustrate cross-platform feasibility.

Robotics (cs.RO); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2509.20717 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2509.20717v2 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2509.20717 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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