Phynetic AI Weeklyby Phynetic
Tag
18 items · newest first

locomotion

Walking, running, climbing — legged and wheeled.

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18 Sep

Learning Safe Humanoid Navigation from Reduced Order Models (paper · 15 minute read)

A single-stage RL navigation pipeline struggles on multi-story terrain, so the authors split the problem: a policy on reduced order dynamics with full 3D LiDAR observations learns multi-story navigation, then kickstarts a full-order policy with a frozen locomotion policy in the loop. A Poisson safety filter recovers safety around out-of-distribution obstacles. On a Unitree G1, RoM-Nav performs mapless multi-floor navigation over 10m of vertical displacement and over 100m of path length.

— cs.RO updates on arXiv.orghumanoidslocomotionhardware
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17 Sep

Helix 2.5: Zero-Shot 30-Home Generalization (8 minute read)

Figure has pretrained Helix 2.5 on Index, its dataset of human behavior, and run three whole-body behaviors — tidying living rooms, folding towels and making beds — in 30 Bay Area homes with no data collected in any of them. The company reports that Index pretraining alone lifts zero-shot success from 9% to 56%, and that Helix 2.5 matches a Helix 02 policy while using half the task-specific data.

— Figure newsvla-foundation-modelshumanoidslocomotion
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15 Sep

BlackPanther2 quadruped runs at 13.2 m/s on a treadmill and 11.65 m/s outdoors, authors report (paper · 15 minute read)

A refined actuator model that captures high-speed voltage coupling and magnetic saturation reduces the sim-to-real gap for fast quadruped running, while a reinforcement learning framework with a two-stage curriculum and adaptive command scheduling keeps training stable. On the 36.5 kg BlackPanther2, the authors report speeds of 13.2 m/s on a treadmill and 11.65 m/s outdoors, which they describe as a world record for quadrupedal robot locomotion.

— cs.RO updates on arXiv.orglocomotionhardwaresimulation
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8 Sep

ETH Zürich's humanoid jumps onto monkey bars and crosses them (video · 3 min)

A humanoid from ETH Zürich's Robotic Systems Lab jumps onto a set of monkey bars, traverses them through sparse bar interactions and lands safely. The lab frames the problem as perceiving thin, overhanging geometry while executing agile, accurate whole-body motions. The video leads IEEE Spectrum's Video Friday for the week.

— YouTube · Robotic Systems Lab: Legged Robotics at ETH Zürichhumanoidslocomotion
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5 Sep

Cyborg Roaches Can Stab You With Needles (4 minute read)

The University of Queensland's Biorobotics Lab has built 'Paraborgs', cockroaches carrying electronics and a spring-loaded needle, to reach people trapped under rubble. Lab director T. Thang Vo-Doan calls cyborg insects a shortcut around some of the hardest problems in robotics: an insect-sized machine that moves through rubble, recovers from falls and carries its own power. An insect already has that mobility, so the lab adds electronics to a live one.

— IEEE Spectrumhardwarelocomotion
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28 Aug

NC State's soft 'ring leaper' keeps jumping while infrared light shines on it (3 minute read)

North Carolina State University researchers have built a teardrop-shaped liquid crystal elastomer robot that twists under infrared light, stores the energy and snaps itself into a jump, resetting on its own so it keeps leaping while the light stays on. The angle of a stiff V-shaped tail decides whether it crawls, jumps forward or leaps upward; the work is published in PNAS.

— news.ncsu.edulocomotionhardware
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28 Aug

First 11 vs 11 humanoid soccer game played at RoboCup 2026 (1 minute read)

RoboCup 2026 saw the first 11-versus-11 humanoid football match, between B-Human of Bremen and HTWK Robots of Leipzig, both using Booster Robotics machines. RoboCup's founders set the goal in 1997 of fielding robots that could beat the human World Cup champions by 2050. RoboCup Federation president Ubbo Visser said the new humanoid hardware paired with AI has put the robots at a level the competition had not seen in earlier years.

— Robohubhumanoidslocomotion
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27 Aug

SOLO: Stable Omni-terrain Long-Horizon Perceptive Humanoid Locomotion (paper · 15 minute read)

SOLO walks a humanoid 1.5 km outdoors zero-shot on nothing but a chest-mounted depth camera and proprioception. It replaces dense terrain reconstruction, which smooths away the detail a footstep needs, with Fourier-encoded cell queries that cut height-map error by a factor of 3.3 to 4. Folding teacher-student disagreement into the PPO reward carries that penalty back to earlier actions, and on stress terrain it reaches 97.5% traversal and 96% on stepping stones against 75% and 0–3% for dense-reconstruction variants.

— arXivlocomotionhumanoids
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26 Aug

Humanoid robots surpass human records in 100M, high jump (2 minute read)

More than 2,000 humanoid robots are competing across 51 events at the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing, held in the National Speed Skating Oval built for the 2022 Winter Olympics. Chinese machines broke human marks on the opening day, including the 100-metre sprint record. The games opened the same week Beijing held the 2026 World Robot Conference, where companies showed around 3,000 products; China makes most of the world's humanoid robots.

— espn.comhumanoidslocomotion
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18 Aug

Drones With Claws Perch on Arctic Icebergs (3 minute read)

Researchers in Canada have built Ice Dart, a drone whose landing gear absorbs a hard landing and grips the surface with microspines, so it can perch on icebergs and glaciers. In tests at Iceland's Fjallsjökull glacier, reported in IEEE Transactions on Field Robotics, it perched at up to 3 m/s on slopes of up to 58 degrees and succeeded every time, even in 30 km/h winds.

— IEEE Spectrumhardwarelocomotion
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17 Aug

LimX Dynamics' TRON 2 patrols an underground utility tunnel on its own (video · 3 min)

LimX Dynamics' TRON 2, fitted with an autonomous mobile manipulation kit, maps and patrols underground utility tunnels, adjusting its posture to reach inspection points at different heights. It detects anomalies, performs light tasks and returns to its charging dock on its own for long unattended shifts. LimX presents the deployment as evidence that partners can build embodied AI applications for city infrastructure and industrial inspection on the platform.

— LimX Dynamics Korealocomotionmanipulation
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12 Aug

ZEST turns motion capture, video and animation into robot skills without fine-tuning (3 minute read)

Researchers at the RAI Institute and Boston Dynamics describe ZEST, a reinforcement-learning recipe that turns motion capture, single-camera video and keyframe animation into whole-body skills, trained entirely in simulation and run on hardware without fine-tuning. On Atlas, Unitree's G1 and Spot it produced crawls, cartwheels, breakdancing and a backflip, each policy taking about 10 hours on one NVIDIA L4 GPU; so far it is limited to flat, non-slippery ground.

— interestingengineering.comhumanoidslocomotionsimulation
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3 Aug

Open-DiffLoco: Open-Source Differentiable Learning for Deployable Blind Quadruped Locomotion (paper · 15 minute read)

Open-DiffLoco is an open-source framework that trains blind quadruped locomotion policies with differentiable simulation, running the Short-Horizon Actor-Critic algorithm in MuJoCo XLA. Deployed on a Unitree Go2, the proprioceptive policy tracks omnidirectional velocity commands with under 0.2 m/s of error, runs faster than 1 m/s and withstands lateral pushes, without reference trajectories or complex auxiliary rewards. Training takes 20 to 60 minutes on a single RTX 5080 with under 6 GB of video memory.

— arXivlocomotionopen-source-toolssimulation