Papers for

robot motion engineers

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Supermimic cuts compute needs drastically for humanoid motion control

SuperMimic: Scaling Humanoid Whole-Body Control with One Differentiable World Model

Abstract: Tracking large human-motion datasets has become the dominant route to general, expressive humanoid whole-body control, but scaling across many motions is expensive. Current pipelines use model-free reinforcement learning, either merging per-motion specialists through lossy distillation, or brute-forcing a single policy with cluster-scale compute. SuperMimic amortizes learning across all motions with one differentiable world model of their shared dynamics, fit from logged transitions of a standard rigid-body simulator. The world model and the tracking policy train together in one loop, and backpropagation-through-time over short imagined rollouts gives the policy analytic gradients. Fast imagined rollouts and analytic gradients make policy learning efficient. In 3 hours on a single GPU, SuperMimic surpasses the return of a state-of-the-art motion tracker baseline trained for 7 days on 128 GPUs. It reduces GPU-hours by more than $1000\times$ and fails on only 25 of 129,514 benchmark motions, versus 179 failures for the baseline. After 9.8 hours on two GPUs, SuperMimic achieves zero failures. From 1 to 264 hours of motion, the world model's prediction error stays stable, and GPU-hours to a target return grow slowly. Our policy transfers to a physical Unitree G1 across diverse and acrobatic motions. SuperMimic removes compute as the bottleneck to scaling humanoid whole-body control, making it practical to measure motion-tracking scaling laws.

Tue 20 OctRobotics
The gist
Controlling robots to mimic human movements requires lots of computing power, especially when trying to handle many different motions. The authors present SuperMimic, a new approach that uses a single, learned model of the robot’s environment to efficiently train a control policy. This method needs far less computing time and resources than previous approaches while tracking a vast number of motions more reliably. They also showed the policy works on a real robot, performing diverse and acrobatic moves.
Open → 2610.28480v1