mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Learning Agile Robotic Locomotion Skills by Imitating Animals

arXiv 2004.00784 ↗First posted 2 Apr 2020cs.RO cs.LGcited by 229

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Cited by 41 in Offline RL and imitation learning from data, but placed by its own abstract, which didn’t fit.

Abstract (arXiv)

Reproducing the diverse and agile locomotion skills of animals has been a longstanding challenge in robotics. While manually-designed controllers have been able to emulate many complex behaviors, building such controllers involves a time-consuming and difficult development process, often requiring substantial expertise of the nuances of each skill. Reinforcement learning provides an appealing alternative for automating the manual effort involved in the development of controllers. However, designing learning objectives that elicit the desired behaviors from an agent can also require a great deal of skill-specific expertise. In this work, we present an imitation learning system that enables legged robots to learn agile locomotion skills by imitating real-world animals. We show that by leveraging reference motion data, a single learning-based approach is able to automatically synthesize controllers for a diverse repertoire behaviors for legged robots. By incorporating sample efficient domain adaptation techniques into the training process, our system is able to learn adaptive policies in simulation that can then be quickly adapted for real-world deployment. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our system, we train an 18-DoF quadruped robot to perform a variety of agile behaviors ranging from different locomotion gaits to dynamic hops and turns.

Key facts. Cited by 229 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 2 Apr 2020.

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2020: 1; 2021: 45; 2022: 40; 2023: 46; 2024: 42; 2025: 35; 2026: 20.

229 papers.

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  1. 2021Isaac Gym: High Performance GPU-Based Physics Simulation For Robot Learningcited by 882
  2. 2021RMA: Rapid Motor Adaptation for Legged Robotscited by 430
  3. 2021PEBBLE: Feedback-Efficient Interactive Reinforcement Learning via Relabeling Experience and Unsupervised Pre-trainingcited by 298
  4. 2021DexMV: Imitation Learning for Dexterous Manipulation from Human Videoscited by 194
  5. 2024Open-TeleVision: Teleoperation with Immersive Active Visual Feedbackcited by 137
  6. 2022Legged Locomotion in Challenging Terrains using Egocentric Visioncited by 131
  7. 2025BeyondMimic: From Motion Tracking to Versatile Humanoid Control via Guided Diffusioncited by 128
  8. 2024Expressive Whole-Body Control for Humanoid Robotscited by 117
  9. 2023Robot Parkour Learningcited by 115
  10. 20243D Diffusion Policy: Generalizable Visuomotor Policy Learning via Simple 3D Representationscited by 115
  11. 2023Learning Agile Soccer Skills for a Bipedal Robot with Deep Reinforcement Learningcited by 111
  12. 2025ASAP: Aligning Simulation and Real-World Physics for Learning Agile Humanoid Whole-Body Skillscited by 104
38 more
  1. 2023Toward General-Purpose Robots via Foundation Models: A Survey and Meta-Analysiscited by 99
  2. 2022Deep Whole-Body Control: Learning a Unified Policy for Manipulation and Locomotioncited by 98
  3. 2021Reinforcement Learning for Robust Parameterized Locomotion Control of Bipedal Robotscited by 95
  4. 2021Reset-Free Reinforcement Learning via Multi-Task Learning: Learning Dexterous Manipulation Behaviors without Human Interventioncited by 90
  5. 2021From Motor Control to Team Play in Simulated Humanoid Footballcited by 87
  6. 2022Robotic Telekinesis: Learning a Robotic Hand Imitator by Watching Humans on Youtubecited by 79
  7. 2023Preference Transformer: Modeling Human Preferences using Transformers for RLcited by 77
  8. 2022A Walk in the Park: Learning to Walk in 20 Minutes With Model-Free Reinforcement Learningcited by 76
  9. 2024ExBody2: Advanced Expressive Humanoid Whole-Body Controlcited by 75
  10. 2023Teach a Robot to FISH: Versatile Imitation from One Minute of Demonstrationscited by 74
  11. 2023PhysHOI: Physics-Based Imitation of Dynamic Human-Object Interactioncited by 72
  12. 2021Learning Vision-Guided Quadrupedal Locomotion End-to-End with Cross-Modal Transformerscited by 71
  13. 2021Minimizing Energy Consumption Leads to the Emergence of Gaits in Legged Robotscited by 67
  14. 2024Reinforcement Learning for Versatile, Dynamic, and Robust Bipedal Locomotion Controlcited by 63
  15. 2022Concurrent Training of a Control Policy and a State Estimator for Dynamic and Robust Legged Locomotioncited by 61
  16. 2024Visual Whole-Body Control for Legged Loco-Manipulationcited by 58
  17. 2021Robot Learning from Randomized Simulations: A Reviewcited by 56
  18. 2021Offline Meta-Reinforcement Learning with Online Self-Supervisioncited by 52
  19. 2021Fast and Efficient Locomotion via Learned Gait Transitionscited by 50
  20. 2023Zero-Shot Robot Manipulation from Passive Human Videoscited by 49
  21. 2021Towards More Generalizable One-shot Visual Imitation Learningcited by 48
  22. 2025Robotic World Model: A Neural Network Simulator for Robust Policy Optimization in Roboticscited by 47
  23. 2025AMO: Adaptive Motion Optimization for Hyper-Dexterous Humanoid Whole-Body Controlcited by 47
  24. 2021AdaRL: What, Where, and How to Adapt in Transfer Reinforcement Learningcited by 46
  25. 2021Coupling Vision and Proprioception for Navigation of Legged Robotscited by 46
  26. 2021Auto-Tuned Sim-to-Real Transfercited by 45
  27. 2023Prompt a Robot to Walk with Large Language Modelscited by 44
  28. 2022LyaNet: A Lyapunov Framework for Training Neural ODEscited by 43
  29. 2026RL Token: Bootstrapping Online RL with Vision-Language-Action Modelscited by 43
  30. 2022NeRF2Real: Sim2real Transfer of Vision-guided Bipedal Motion Skills using Neural Radiance Fieldscited by 41
  31. 2023Neural Volumetric Memory for Visual Locomotion Controlcited by 40
  32. 2024Towards Generalist Robot Learning from Internet Video: A Surveycited by 40
  33. 2022Adapting Rapid Motor Adaptation for Bipedal Robotscited by 39
  34. 2022Advanced Skills by Learning Locomotion and Local Navigation End-to-Endcited by 39
  35. 2025KungfuBot: Physics-Based Humanoid Whole-Body Control for Learning Highly-Dynamic Skillscited by 39
  36. 2022GenLoco: Generalized Locomotion Controllers for Quadrupedal Robotscited by 36
  37. 2024Deep Generative Models in Robotics: A Survey on Learning from Multimodal Demonstrationscited by 35
  38. 2024AffordDP: Generalizable Diffusion Policy with Transferable Affordancecited by 35

50 most cited of 229 All 229 (JSON)

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  1. 2026Learning Highly Dynamic Skills Transition for Quadruped Jumping Through Constrained Space ↗
  2. 2023Manipulator as a Tail: Promoting Dynamic Stability for Legged Locomotion
  3. 2023Learning Terrain-Adaptive Locomotion with Agile Behaviors by Imitating Animals
  4. 2025Learning Diverse Natural Behaviors for Enhancing the Agility of Quadrupedal Robots ↗
  5. 2026Teaching a Robot Dog New Tricks: Diverse Quadruped Skills via Combined Reinforcement and Imitation Learning with Adversarial Task Selection
  6. 2024Experience-Learning Inspired Two-Step Reward Method for Efficient Legged Locomotion Learning Towards Natural and Robust Gaits
  7. 2025Learning a Unified Policy for Position and Force Control in Legged Loco-Manipulation
  8. 2026LocoVLM: Grounding Vision and Language for Adapting Versatile Legged Locomotion Policies