KungfuAthleteBot: learning high-dynamic humanoid motion from video with unified robust recovery

Abstract:Video is an abundant, inexpensive source of human motion data that is rich in extreme athletic behaviors. Making it usable for humanoid robots, however, is not a matter of simply retargeting a reconstructed trajectory: video-derived motion is physically inconsistent, devoid of actuation information, and says nothing about failure or recovery. We present KungfuAthleteBot (KAB), a framework that treats learning high-dynamic motion from video as the central problem and resolves each of these three failure modes in turn. (C1) We build the KungfuAthlete dataset from videos of national-level martial artists and introduce a physics-guided parabolic trajectory correction that removes height floating, ground penetration, and high-frequency jitter from reconstructed aerial and landing phases. (C2) Because video carries no force information, strict tracking of a reconstructed trajectory is dynamically infeasible, and error-driven initialization keeps re-launching the policy from infeasible aerial poses. We introduce physics-driven pseudo-low-kinetic-energy (LKE) sampling, our central mechanism for making such references learnable: it biases initialization towards dynamically feasible states, letting the policy discover feasible actuation patterns instead of imitating infeasible ones. (C3) Finally, we introduce a direct training paradigm in which disturbance rejection and fall recovery are learned inside the same policy that tracks the video motion, requiring no recovery reference data and no manual mode switching. On a humanoid robot, KAB learns dynamic skills from video and recovers from arbitrary falls in about 0.7 s, the fastest reported recovery for a unified policy. Ablations on the unified policy confirm the necessity of its components, supporting the view that repairing and compensating video data, rather than only collecting more of it, is what unlocks high-dynamic humanoid skills.

Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2610.03388 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2610.03388v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.03388 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.

Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.

Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.