From motor control to embodied intelligence - Google DeepMind
Using human and animal motions to teach robots to dribble a ball, and simulated humanoid characters to carry boxes and play football Humanoid character learning to traverse an obstacle course through trial-and-error, which can lead to idiosyncratic solutions. Heess, et al. "Emergence of locomotion behaviours in rich environments" (2017). Five years ago, we took on the challenge of teaching a fully articulated humanoid character to traverse obstacle courses. This demonstrated what reinforcement learning (RL) can achieve through trial-and-error but also highlighted two challenges in solving embodied intelligence: Here, we describe a solution to both challenges called neural probabilistic motor primitives (NPMP), involving guided learning with movement patterns derived from humans and animals, and discuss how this approach is used in our Humanoid Football paper, published today in Science Robotics. We also discuss how this same approach enables humanoid full-body manipulation from vision,
August 31, 2022 Research Siqi Liu, Leonard Hasenclever, Steven Bohez, Guy Lever, Zhe Wang, S. M. Ali Eslami, Nicolas Heess Using human and animal motions to teach robots to dribble a ball, and simulated humanoid characters to carry boxes and play football Humanoid character learning to traverse an obstacle course through trial-and-error, which can lead to idiosyncratic solutions. Heess, et al. "Emergence of locomotion behaviours in rich environments" (2017). Five years ago, we took on the challenge of teaching a fully articulated humanoid character to traverse obstacle courses. This…
related reading
- From motor control to embodied intelligencedeepmind.com
- State of Robot Learning, December 2025vedder.io
- How Claude Performs on Robotics Tasks \ Anthropicanthropic.com
- Physical Intelligence (π)pi.website
- GitHub - adam-maj/robotics: A deep dive on the history of robotics and the future of humanoidsgithub.com
- Many Small Steps for Robots, One Giant Leap for Mankindnotboring.co
- CS 294-277, Robots That Learn (Spring 2026)robots-that-learn.github.io
- BeyondMimic: From Motion Tracking to Versatile Humanoid Control via Guided Diffusionarxiv.org
- A Unified Model for Motion-Conditioned Robot Co-designtransformer-transformer.github.io
- Helix: A Vision-Language-Action Model for Generalist Humanoid Controlfigure.ai
- Learning Sim-to-Real Humanoid Locomotion in 15 Minutesyounggyo.me
- Generalist - GEN-1: Scaling Embodied Foundation Models to Masterygeneralistai.com