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🚀 Introducing SoftMimic: Compliant humanoids for an interactive future — bringing humanoids into the real world 🤝 🔗 Current humanoids collapse when they touch the world — they can’t handle contact or deviation from their reference motion 😭 😎SoftMimic learns to deviate gracefully from motion references. It natively embraces... show more

Pulkit Agrawal

17,530 subscribers

40,286 views • 10 months ago •via X (Twitter)

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19 Comments

Pieter Abbeel10 months ago

impressive

Pulkit Agrawal10 months ago

😍Unlike today's stiff humanoids, soft mimic is robust to unexpected collisions 🔗

Pulkit Agrawal10 months ago

🤩Using the same motion reference, soft mimic picks up boxes of different sizes -- free generalization! 🔗

Pulkit Agrawal10 months ago

🙀🤯Soft mimic is extremely robust while still being safe and doing what you want the robot to do. 🔗

Pulkit Agrawal10 months ago

🥳Soft mimic is compliant enabling gentle interactions 🔗

Pulkit Agrawal10 months ago

🤯🤩Soft mimic can be quickly programmed for new tasks, zero-shot 🔗

James10 months ago

It has invisible lats syndrome

Mengdi Xu10 months ago

Very cool results. Congrats!

Sunil Gora10 months ago

Impressive work! Isn't it learning the 'admittance control'?

Pulkit Agrawal10 months ago

yes

czr10 months ago

cool！

Sammy10 months ago

Amazing

ζ Pedram ζ10 months ago

Would love to see code on this, but this is the most practical way to real scalability. Also minimum requirements for Kung Fu

Kaival Shah 🤔10 months ago

Super cool!

ζ Pedram ζ10 months ago

So nice

Michal Nauman10 months ago

Awesome work 🦾

Carlos DP 🤖🇺🇸10 months ago

Very cool work! Similar to the goals of FALCON, but within a motion tracking context, I like it

Sarika saah🇺🇸6 months ago

In the real world, true success lies in not falling over from bumps and touches, and SoftMimic has nailed this point. How easy is it to deploy this framework on robots like Unitree or Digit? 😌

Priyanka Agrawal9 months ago

The future depends on robots.

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10,952 views • 5 months ago

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RoboHub🤖

72,367 views • 5 months ago

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Ilir Aliu

22,881 views • 10 months ago

⚠️ THE ROBOT DIDN’T ENTER A ROBOT TESTING LAB. IT ENTERED A CITY. A humanoid robot is moving through a real urban environment with pedestrians, traffic and constantly changing space around it. There’s no empty runway and no perfectly controlled path - the machine has to keep moving while the world around it does whatever it wants. That makes a few seconds of walking far more interesting than another polished stage demo. A city is one of the hardest places to test a humanoid because nothing stays predictable for long. People stop, cars move, distances change and obstacles appear without warning, while the robot still has to maintain balance and choose where to step next. The challenge isn't simply walking anymore - it's understanding how to move through a world that wasn't designed for robots. And that's the real milestone here. Humanoids don't need to look perfectly human to change the world; they need to become capable of functioning in spaces already built for us. The closer they get to doing that reliably, the less important the laboratory demos become. The future won't feel futuristic because robots look human. It will feel futuristic when robots can move through our world like they belong there.

⚠️ THE ROBOT DIDN’T ENTER A ROBOT TESTING LAB. IT ENTERED A CITY. A humanoid robot is moving through a real urban environment with pedestrians, traffic and constantly changing space around it. There’s no empty runway and no perfectly controlled path - the machine has to keep moving while the world around it does whatever it wants. That makes a few seconds of walking far more interesting than another polished stage demo. A city is one of the hardest places to test a humanoid because nothing stays predictable for long. People stop, cars move, distances change and obstacles appear without warning, while the robot still has to maintain balance and choose where to step next. The challenge isn't simply walking anymore - it's understanding how to move through a world that wasn't designed for robots. And that's the real milestone here. Humanoids don't need to look perfectly human to change the world; they need to become capable of functioning in spaces already built for us. The closer they get to doing that reliably, the less important the laboratory demos become. The future won't feel futuristic because robots look human. It will feel futuristic when robots can move through our world like they belong there.

Future Memo

10,138 views • 1 month ago

Not a preplanned motion sequence. A robot deciding mid-jump what to do next. [📍 paper + demo] Researchers just showed a humanoid doing real parkour using only onboard perception. No motion script, no fixed obstacle layout. The system is called Perceptive Humanoid Parkour (PHP). Instead of memorizing a path, the robot reads depth from its cameras and continuously chooses actions. Step, vault, climb, or roll depending on what geometry appears in front of it. To make that possible, they combine three ideas: First, they stitch together human motion clips into long movement references so the robot learns fluid transitions instead of isolated tricks. Second, they train tracking policies with reinforcement learning so contacts land at the right time and the robot keeps balance during dynamic moves. Finally, everything is distilled into one perception policy that runs directly from depth input to action selection. The result on a Unitree G1: about 3 m/s vaults wall climbs up to 1.25 m nearly one minute continuous obstacle traversal adapting when obstacles move What matters is not the tricks. It is the shift in capability. Earlier humanoids executed motions. This one navigates situations. Once robots react to geometry instead of replaying trajectories, environments stop needing to be predictable. Warehouses, homes, and outdoors suddenly become the same problem. Thanks for sharing, Zhen Wu! Paper + demo: ——— Weekly robotics and AI insights. Subscribe free:

Not a preplanned motion sequence. A robot deciding mid-jump what to do next. [📍 paper + demo] Researchers just showed a humanoid doing real parkour using only onboard perception. No motion script, no fixed obstacle layout. The system is called Perceptive Humanoid Parkour (PHP). Instead of memorizing a path, the robot reads depth from its cameras and continuously chooses actions. Step, vault, climb, or roll depending on what geometry appears in front of it. To make that possible, they combine three ideas: First, they stitch together human motion clips into long movement references so the robot learns fluid transitions instead of isolated tricks. Second, they train tracking policies with reinforcement learning so contacts land at the right time and the robot keeps balance during dynamic moves. Finally, everything is distilled into one perception policy that runs directly from depth input to action selection. The result on a Unitree G1: about 3 m/s vaults wall climbs up to 1.25 m nearly one minute continuous obstacle traversal adapting when obstacles move What matters is not the tricks. It is the shift in capability. Earlier humanoids executed motions. This one navigates situations. Once robots react to geometry instead of replaying trajectories, environments stop needing to be predictable. Warehouses, homes, and outdoors suddenly become the same problem. Thanks for sharing, Zhen Wu! Paper + demo: ——— Weekly robotics and AI insights. Subscribe free:

Ilir Aliu

22,127 views • 6 months ago

Fei-Fei Li ( Fei-Fei Li ) beautifully explains Robotics. She defines robotics not by form, like humanoids or cars, but by function: they are any "embodied machines" that must perceive, understand, and act within a physical, 3D space. This core requirement is "spatial intelligence," the unifying principle of all robotics, allowing them to perform tasks and even collaborate with humans. Throughout all of human history, we have been confined to a single, shared reality: the "physical Earth 3D world." This singularity has been our only playground. However, new technologies that combine 3D generation and reconstruction are shattering this limitation. We can now create "infinite universes"—a multiverse of digital worlds for countless purposes, from training robots to enabling creativity, travel, and storytelling. This leap from one physical world to an infinite multiverse unlocks boundless possibilities for human imagination and interaction. Video from a16z

Fei-Fei Li ( Fei-Fei Li ) beautifully explains Robotics. She defines robotics not by form, like humanoids or cars, but by function: they are any "embodied machines" that must perceive, understand, and act within a physical, 3D space. This core requirement is "spatial intelligence," the unifying principle of all robotics, allowing them to perform tasks and even collaborate with humans. Throughout all of human history, we have been confined to a single, shared reality: the "physical Earth 3D world." This singularity has been our only playground. However, new technologies that combine 3D generation and reconstruction are shattering this limitation. We can now create "infinite universes"—a multiverse of digital worlds for countless purposes, from training robots to enabling creativity, travel, and storytelling. This leap from one physical world to an infinite multiverse unlocks boundless possibilities for human imagination and interaction. Video from a16z

Rohan Paul

51,174 views • 4 months ago

Fei-Fei Li ( Fei-Fei Li ) beautifully explains Robotics. She defines robotics not by form, like humanoids or cars, but by function: they are any "embodied machines" that must perceive, understand, and act within a physical, 3D space. This core requirement is "spatial intelligence," the unifying principle of all robotics, allowing them to perform tasks and even collaborate with humans. Throughout all of human history, we have been confined to a single, shared reality: the "physical Earth 3D world." This singularity has been our only playground. However, new technologies that combine 3D generation and reconstruction are shattering this limitation. We can now create "infinite universes"—a multiverse of digital worlds for countless purposes, from training robots to enabling creativity, travel, and storytelling. This leap from one physical world to an infinite multiverse unlocks boundless possibilities for human imagination and interaction. Video from a16z

Fei-Fei Li ( Fei-Fei Li ) beautifully explains Robotics. She defines robotics not by form, like humanoids or cars, but by function: they are any "embodied machines" that must perceive, understand, and act within a physical, 3D space. This core requirement is "spatial intelligence," the unifying principle of all robotics, allowing them to perform tasks and even collaborate with humans. Throughout all of human history, we have been confined to a single, shared reality: the "physical Earth 3D world." This singularity has been our only playground. However, new technologies that combine 3D generation and reconstruction are shattering this limitation. We can now create "infinite universes"—a multiverse of digital worlds for countless purposes, from training robots to enabling creativity, travel, and storytelling. This leap from one physical world to an infinite multiverse unlocks boundless possibilities for human imagination and interaction. Video from a16z

Rohan Paul

41,441 views • 8 months ago