GuideWalk: Learning Unified Autonomous Navigation and Locomotion for Humanoid Robots across Versatile Terrains

Abstract:Humanoid robots have achieved strong locomotion capabilities, but reliable navigation on versatile terrains remains challenging because obstacle avoidance must be coordinated with dynamically feasible motion. In this work, we present GuideWalk, a unified end-to-end framework that integrates traversability-aware navigation guidance with terrain-adaptive locomotion teacher for humanoid navigation. Specifically, we introduce a navigation module that provides explicit velocity guidance, decoupling obstacle avoidance from terrain conditions to enable robust planning across diverse environments. We propose an efficient two-stage training strategy with composite teacher distillation, where goal-directed commands and dynamically consistent actions are aggregated and distilled into a single policy. To further improve robustness, the distilled policy is refined with reinforcement learning and an auxiliary behavior cloning objective, which promotes exploration while preserving desirable teacher behaviors. Experiments demonstrate that GuideWalk achieves terrain-adaptive, goal-directed obstacle navigation across diverse terrains. Videos are available on our project website: this https URL

Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2606.10449 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2606.10449v3 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.10449 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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