StyleLoco: Generative Adversarial Distillation for Natural Humanoid Robot Locomotion
Journal:
arXiv
Published Date:
Mar 19, 2025
Abstract
Humanoid robots are anticipated to acquire a wide range of locomotion
capabilities while ensuring natural movement across varying speeds and
terrains. Existing methods encounter a fundamental dilemma in learning humanoid
locomotion: reinforcement learning with handcrafted rewards can achieve agile
locomotion but produces unnatural gaits, while Generative Adversarial Imitation
Learning (GAIL) with motion capture data yields natural movements but suffers
from unstable training processes and restricted agility. Integrating these
approaches proves challenging due to the inherent heterogeneity between expert
policies and human motion datasets. To address this, we introduce StyleLoco, a
novel two-stage framework that bridges this gap through a Generative
Adversarial Distillation (GAD) process. Our framework begins by training a
teacher policy using reinforcement learning to achieve agile and dynamic
locomotion. It then employs a multi-discriminator architecture, where distinct
discriminators concurrently extract skills from both the teacher policy and
motion capture data. This approach effectively combines the agility of
reinforcement learning with the natural fluidity of human-like movements while
mitigating the instability issues commonly associated with adversarial
training. Through extensive simulation and real-world experiments, we
demonstrate that StyleLoco enables humanoid robots to perform diverse
locomotion tasks with the precision of expertly trained policies and the
natural aesthetics of human motion, successfully transferring styles across
different movement types while maintaining stable locomotion across a broad
spectrum of command inputs.
