GuideWalk: Learning Unified Autonomous Navigation and Locomotion for Humanoid Robots across Versatile Terrains
Abstract
Humanoid robots have achieved strong locomotion capabilities, but reliable navigation on versatile terrains remains challenging because obstacle avoidance must be coordinated with dynamically feasible motion. In this work, we present GuideWalk, a unified end-to-end framework that integrates traversability-aware navigation guidance with terrain-adaptive locomotion teacher for humanoid navigation. Specifically, we introduce a navigation module that provides explicit velocity guidance, decoupling obstacle avoidance from terrain conditions to enable robust planning across diverse environments. We propose an efficient two-stage training strategy with composite teacher distillation, where goal-directed commands and dynamically consistent actions are aggregated and distilled into a single policy. To further improve robustness, the distilled policy is refined with reinforcement learning and an auxiliary behavior cloning objective, which promotes exploration while preserving desirable teacher behaviors. Experiments demonstrate that GuideWalk achieves terrain-adaptive, goal-directed obstacle navigation across diverse terrains.
Overview
Overview of GuideWalk Left: a composite teacher consisting of a DWA-based navigation module and a pre-trained locomotion policy. Middle: Stage 1, where the student policy and critic are trained via DAgger-based imitation from the composite teacher. Right: Stage 2, where reinforcement learning with an imitation objective further refines the policy.
Simulation Results
Slope
Beam
Door
Obstacle Avoidance on Stairs
Dense obstacles
GuideWalk
Deployable hierarchical
Stairs
GuideWalk
Deployable hierarchical
Ablation Studies
Stairs
GuideWalk
w/o Loco. teacher
w/o Nav. guidance
w/o Stage 2
Obstacle Avoidance
GuideWalk
w/o Loco. teacher
w/o Nav. guidance
w/o Stage 2
Real World Experiments
Flat Ground
Static Obstacle
Dynamic Obstacle
Multiple Obstacles
Upstairs
Upslope & Downstairs
Upstairs & Downslope