Contact-UAN: Unsupervised Actuator Networks as a Residual World Model for Humanoid Control

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

Humanoid policies trained in simulation can transfer qualitatively to hardware while failing to transfer the force interactions learned during training, compromising torque efficiency, load regulation, and robustness to impacts. This failure can arise from actuator sim-to-real gaps because forces depend on actuator torques. We introduce Contact-UAN, a residual world model that preserves a simulator's physics priors while correcting actuator dynamics to align simulated rollouts with recorded hardware rollouts. For humanoid motion with contact, this requires contact-consistent replay: if hardware playback in simulation begins with misaligned contact wrenches, the residual model learns to correct reset artifacts rather than actuator discrepancies. Using only onboard proprioception, Contact-UAN infers the simulator-side stance-foot pose needed to initialize replay with consistent contact forces. We show that a UAN trained on 6.5 minutes of real-world walking data generalizes to tasks that benefit from accurate force and impulse regulation and produces policies that transfer seamlessly to the real world, yielding 20% lower running torque, 43% lower force-tracking error, extreme compliance, accurate impedance control, and dynamic, robust jumps.

Links and sources

• Official / arXiv page
• PDF from original source

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