Learning Agile Humanoid Dodgeball with Onboard Monocular Vision

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Original abstract

Humanoid robots operating in shared, dynamic environments must respond to rapidly approaching objects while maintaining balance. We study dodgeball as a controlled test of this capability, coupling visual threat assessment with whole-body evasion, recovery, and target reacquisition. We develop a system that integrates onboard monocular perception, temporal ball-state and threat-flag estimation, and learned whole-body control. A ball detector supplies bounding-box histories, and a temporal estimator predicts relative ball position and a binary threat flag. Separate dodge/recovery and search/track policies share this interface and are composed to support repeated encounters. A three-stage curriculum first trains control with privileged ball states, then starts estimator supervision from stable policy rollouts, and finally replaces the actor's privileged inputs with estimator outputs. Analytic projection and perception randomization provide detector-like training observations without image rendering. Across approach-angle bins in controlled simulation, dodge success ranges from 97.8--100.0% for 5.0 m launches at 6 m/s to 33.2--40.8% for 2.5 m launches at 10 m/s, with 1000 throws per speed--distance condition. On a physical Unitree G1, controlled single-throw success exceeds 85% over more than 15 trials. A hardware sequence demonstrates full-azimuth target reacquisition followed by another dodge. These results demonstrate an integrated onboard-monocular-vision system under highly dynamic motions.

Links and sources

• Official / arXiv page
• PDF from original source

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