Made a humanoid robot do monkey bars

[u/Boring_Focus_9710]

https://youtu.be/kY2mQaM4lQ8?si=j8vN5x2PAJsescbK

paper link https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29769v1

website https://nemantor.github.io/sparse-3d-traversal-website/

We delivered the first humanoid monkey-bar traversal with perceptive jumping up + branchiation + jumping down, with a high success rate on the real robot (~95%). Besides, we also did tasks like ducking beneath thin obstacles.

The contributions include: 1) hardware designs, hooks that can disengage by rotation and a solid-state lidar mount; 2) multi-teacher + single end2end student distillation + finetuning pipeline for policy learning; 3) modelling of lidar noise patterns, actuator temperature, and battery voltage-current changes for sim2real.

Happy and proud annoucement: No hardware was broken during our development of this project.