HoST

Learning Humanoid Standing-up Control Across Diverse Postures

Learning Humanoid Standing-up Control across Diverse Postures

1Shanghai Jiao Tong University, 2Shanghai AI Laboratory 3The University of Hong Kong
4Zhejiang University 5The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Overview


Abstract

Standing-up control is crucial for humanoid robots, with the potential for integration into current locomotion and loco-manipulation systems, such as fall recovery. Existing approaches are either limited to simulations that overlook hard- ware constraints or rely on predefined ground-specific motion trajectories, failing to enable standing up across postures in real-world scenes. To bridge this gap, we present HoST (Humanoid Standing-up Control), a reinforcement learning framework that learns standing-up control from scratch, enabling robust sim-to-real transfer across diverse postures. HoST effectively learns posture-adaptive motions by leveraging a multi-critic architecture and curriculum-based training on diverse simulated terrains. To ensure successful real-world deployment, we constrain the motion with smoothness regularization and implicit motion speed bound to alleviate oscillatory and violent motions on physical hardware, respectively. After simulation-based training, the learned control policies are directly deployed on the Unitree G1 humanoid robot. Our experimental results demonstrate that the controllers achieve smooth, stable, and robust standing-up motions across a wide range of laboratory and outdoor environments.

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Standing up in Outdoor Environments

Wooden Floor

Lean on Tree

Stone Road

Grass Slope

Platform

Grassland


Standing up in Indoor Environments

Lie on Ground

Lie on Sofa

Lie on Slope

Lean against Sofa

Recline on Chair

Seat on Chair


Robustness

Front Force & Standing Stability

Dynamic Balance on 15° Slipery Slope

Back Force

Soft Stumbling Object

Fall Recovery

6kg Payload (0.5x Trunk Mass)


Framework

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Our RL-based framework learns posture-adaptive standing-up control from scratch via the following key design choices:

  • Reward Design & Optimization: To better balance/estimate the reward functions/returns, We classify reward functions to four reward groups and adopt multi-critic RL to do optimization on each reward group separately.
  • Exploration Strategies: To accelerate exploration, we enforce the robot with a vertical pulling force during the initial training stage and reduce this force with a curriculum manner.
  • Motion Constraints: To learn smooth motions for real-world deployment, we employ (1) smoothness regularization to prevent motion oscillations, and (2) an curriculum-based action rescaler (action bound) to implicitly constrain the torque limit and motion speed to avoid violent motions.
  • Sim-to-real Transfer: To mitigate sim2real gap, we make two attempts: (1) diverse terrains to simulate real-world starting postures, and (2) domain randomization to reduce the influence of physical discrepancies bwteen simulation and real world.

BibTeX

@article{huang2025host,
  title     = {Learning Humanoid Standing-up Control across Diverse Postures},
  author    = {Huang, Tao and Ren, Junli and Wang, Huayi and Wang, Zirui and Ben, Qingwei and Wen, Muning and Chen, Xiao and Li, Jianan and Pang, Jiangmiao},
  journal   = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.08378},
  year      = {2025},
}