Playing Soccer Like Humans Do: Learning Versatile and Agile Humanoid Soccer via Latent Motion Priors

Abstract
Humanoid soccer requires a robot to seamlessly combine agile locomotion, ball manipulation, and impact-rich contact dynamics across a continuous, dynamic behavioral spectrum. Yet existing approaches either cover only a limited set of skills, or forego motion priors entirely and produce unnatural behaviors, leaving the combination of a unified skill set and human-like motion quality unaddressed. We present SOCCERBOT, a hierarchical reinforcement learning framework thatresolves both limitations through a structured latent motion prior distilled from large-scale human soccer motion capture data. By constraining policy learning within this dynamically plausible motion manifold, a single skill-conditioned policy naturally learns to perform moving, dribbling, trapping, and kicking in a unified formulation, while inherently producing human-like motion and fluid transitions during commanded skill switching. Augmented by robustness-oriented simulation design, SOCCERBOT transfers zero-shot to the Unitree G1 humanoid robot, demonstrating agile, natural, and robust execution of the full soccer skill repertoire under real-world conditions.
Authors
Haoyu Shao, Yunshen Wang, Jingze Zhang, Shaohang Zhu, Tianzhu Zhang, Baoxiong Jia†, Siyuan Huang†
Publication Year
2026
http://eng.bigai.ai/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2026/10/CoRL26_Playing_Soccer_Like_Humans.pdf
Publication Venue
CoRL
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