Learning Agile Striker Skills for Humanoid Soccer Robots from Noisy Sensory Input

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2512.06571v2
• Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2025 21:53:32 GMT
• Title: Learning Agile Striker Skills for Humanoid Soccer Robots from Noisy Sensory Input
• Abstract summary: This paper presents a reinforcement learning-based system that enables humanoid robots to execute robust continual ball-kicking.<n>The system extends a typical teacher-student training framework.<n>Key design elements are critical for closing the sim-to-real gap and sustaining performance under perceptual uncertainty.
• Score: 28.158114356214863
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• 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 system that enables humanoid robots to execute robust continual ball-kicking with adaptability to different ball-goal configurations. The system 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 system for learning 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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