Abstract: Humanoid soccer poses a representative challenge for embodied intelligence, requiring robots to operate within a tightly coupled perception-action loop. However, existing systems typically rely on decoupled modules, resulting in delayed responses and incoherent behaviors in dynamic environments, while real-world perceptual limitations further exacerbate these issues. In this work, we present a unified reinforcement learning-based controller that enables humanoid robots to acquire reactive soccer skills through the direct integration of visual perception and motion control. Our approach extends Adversarial Motion Priors to perceptual settings in real-world dynamic environments, bridging motion imitation and visually grounded dynamic control. We introduce an encoder-decoder architecture combined with a virtual perception system that models real-world visual characteristics, allowing the policy to recover privileged states from imperfect observations and establish active coordination between perception and action. The resulting controller demonstrates strong reactivity, consistently executing coherent and robust soccer behaviors across various scenarios, including real RoboCup matches.


Outdoor Environments

RoboCup Matches

Continuous Performance

Agile Behaviors

Forward

Left

Backward

Right

Dynamic Movements

Adaptive Gait

Success Rate


Methods

  • Training: The actor receives partial observations and reconstructs the full state from historical data using an encoder-decoder architecture. The policy is trained with PPO, with rewards from both the environment and a discriminator encoding motion priors, while multiple critics provide value estimates.
  • Deployment: The real-world robot is equipped with an onboard camera for visual perception. The detected ball positions are directly provided to the policy, while an odometer module estimates the goal location from long-term information.

Acknowledgments

We thank Booster Robotics for providing the robot platform, experimental environment, and technical support. This work was partly supported by STI 2030-Major Projects (No. 2021ZD0201402, No. 2021ZD0201401), Beijing Natural Science Foundation (No. L243004), and Tsinghua University Initiative Scientific Research Program (Student Academic Research Advancement Program: Zhuiguang Special Project, No. 20257020011).

BibTeX

@article{wang2025learning,
  title   = {Learning Vision-Driven Reactive Soccer Skills for Humanoid Robots},
  author  = {Wang, Yushi and Luo, Changsheng and Chen, Penghui and Liu, Jianran and Sun, Weijian and Guo, Tong and Yang, Kechang and Hu, Biao and Zhang, Yangang and Zhao, Mingguo},
  journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.03996},
  year    = {2025},
}