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Learning Agile Striker Skills for Humanoid Soccer Robots from Noisy Sensory Input.
Zifan
Xu, Myoungkyu Seo, Dongmyeong Lee, Hao Fu, Jiaheng
Hu, Jiaxun Cui, Yuqian Jiang, Zhihan Wang,
Anastasiia Brund, Joydeep Biswas, and Peter
Stone.
In International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), June 2026.
Learning fast and robust ball-kicking skills is a critical capability for humanoid soccer robots, yet it remains a challenging problem due to the need for rapid leg swings, postural stability on a single support foot, and robustness under noisy sensory input and external perturbations (e.g., opponents). This paper presents a reinforcement learning (RL)–based training pipeline that enables humanoid robots to execute robust continual ball-kicking with adaptability to different ball-goal configurations. The pipeline extends a typical teacher-student training framework---in which a ``teacher" policy is trained with ground truth state information and the ``student" learns to mimic it with noisy, imperfect sensing---by including four training stages: (1) long-distance ball chasing (teacher); (2) directional kicking (teacher); (3) teacher policy distillation (student), and (4) student adaptation and refinement (student). Key design elements---including tailored reward functions, realistic noise modeling, and online constrained RL for adaptation and refinement---are critical for closing the sim-to-real gap and sustaining performance under perceptual uncertainty. Extensive evaluations in both simulation and on a real robot demonstrate strong kicking accuracy and goal-scoring success across diverse ball–goal configurations. Ablation studies further highlight the necessity of the constrained RL, noise modeling, and the adaptation stage. This work presents a training pipeline for robust continual humanoid ball-kicking under imperfect perception, establishing a benchmark task for visuomotor skill learning in humanoid whole-body control.
@InProceedings{zifan_xu_icra_2026,
author = {Zifan Xu and Myoungkyu Seo and Dongmyeong Lee and Hao Fu and Jiaheng Hu and Jiaxun Cui and Yuqian Jiang and Zhihan Wang and Anastasiia Brund and Joydeep Biswas and Peter Stone},
title = {Learning Agile Striker Skills for Humanoid Soccer Robots from Noisy Sensory Input},
booktitle = {International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)},
year = {2026},
month = {June},
location = {Vienna, Austria},
abstract = {Learning fast and robust ball-kicking skills is a critical capability for humanoid soccer robots, yet it remains a challenging problem due to the need for rapid leg swings, postural stability on a single support foot, and robustness under noisy sensory input and external perturbations (e.g., opponents). This paper presents a reinforcement learning (RL)–based training pipeline that enables humanoid robots to execute robust continual ball-kicking with adaptability to different ball-goal configurations. The pipeline extends a typical teacher-student training framework---in which a ``teacher" policy is trained with ground truth state information and the ``student" learns to mimic it with noisy, imperfect sensing---by including four training stages: (1) long-distance ball chasing (teacher); (2) directional kicking (teacher); (3) teacher policy distillation (student), and (4) student adaptation and refinement (student). Key design elements---including tailored reward functions, realistic noise modeling, and online constrained RL for adaptation and refinement---are critical for closing the sim-to-real gap and sustaining performance under perceptual uncertainty. Extensive evaluations in both simulation and on a real robot demonstrate strong kicking accuracy and goal-scoring success across diverse ball–goal configurations. Ablation studies further highlight the necessity of the constrained RL, noise modeling, and the adaptation stage. This work presents a training pipeline for robust continual humanoid ball-kicking under imperfect perception, establishing a benchmark task for visuomotor skill learning in humanoid whole-body control.},
}
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