Vision as Proprioception: Estimating Humanoid Robot Pose from Video

Engineering notes

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Chinese explanation / 中文解读

中文解读待补充：本站会优先为 VLA、具身智能、人形机器人控制、机器人操作等高价值论文补充中文说明。

Original abstract

Estimating a humanoid robot's internal state from video has a wide range of real-world applications but remains unexplored. During interactions with a robot, its onboard state information may be unavailable due to privacy, ownership, or communication constraints. Meanwhile, online and AI-generated robot videos provide rich sources of data but typically lack corresponding joint configurations, limiting their direct use in robot learning. To address these issues, we present HumanoidPose, a new framework that treats vision as proprioception to recover full-body joint configurations in world space from video alone. Specifically, we combine pretrained human-pose features with robot kinematics in a unified model that predicts each embodiment's joint configurations. We retarget human motions to sixteen different humanoid embodiments, enabling scalable learning entirely from synthetic data. To improve real-world generalization, we further leverage unlabeled online videos through self-training to develop a 2D robot-pose detector. In our evaluation, HumanoidPose improves joint-angle and joint-position accuracy over the evaluated baselines and reduces joint-angle error by 18-32% relative to the best-performing baseline on each of the three real humanoid platforms. We further show improved global localization and generalization to unseen embodiments. HumanoidPose enables visual understanding of other robots during interaction and extraction of robot motion from online and generated videos.

Links and sources

• Official / arXiv page
• PDF from original source

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