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Learning to Get Up Across Morphologies: Zero-Shot Recovery with a Unified Humanoid Policy

Robotics 2025-12-16 v1 Machine Learning

Abstract

Fall recovery is a critical skill for humanoid robots in dynamic environments such as RoboCup, where prolonged downtime often decides the match. Recent techniques using deep reinforcement learning (DRL) have produced robust get-up behaviors, yet existing methods require training of separate policies for each robot morphology. This paper presents a single DRL policy capable of recovering from falls across seven humanoid robots with diverse heights (0.48 - 0.81 m), weights (2.8 - 7.9 kg), and dynamics. Trained with CrossQ, the unified policy transfers zero-shot up to 86 +/- 7% (95% CI [81, 89]) on unseen morphologies, eliminating the need for robot-specific training. Comprehensive leave-one-out experiments, morph scaling analysis, and diversity ablations show that targeted morphological coverage improves zero-shot generalization. In some cases, the shared policy even surpasses the specialist baselines. These findings illustrate the practicality of morphology-agnostic control for fall recovery, laying the foundation for generalist humanoid control. The software is open-source and available at: https://github.com/utra-robosoccer/unified-humanoid-getup

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2512.12230,
  title  = {Learning to Get Up Across Morphologies: Zero-Shot Recovery with a Unified Humanoid Policy},
  author = {Jonathan Spraggett},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.12230},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

Accepted at 28th RoboCup International Symposium