GuideWalk: Learning Unified Autonomous Navigation and Locomotion for Humanoid Robots across Versatile Terrains

GuideWalk demonstrates coordinated navigation and locomotion over challenging terrains in MuJoCo, including stairs, beams, slopes, and obstacles.

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

First research result visualization

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