Vision-Based Dribbling for Humanoid Soccer via Privileged Representation Learning

Published July 15, 2026 · Category: Robotics

Overview

arXiv:2607.12702v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent advances in humanoid robotics have highlighted the importance of deployable loco-manipulation skills. Dribbling a soccer ball while evading active opponents requires simultaneous balance, precise ball control, and awareness of a dynamic adversary under onboard sensing and real-time constraints. Existing approaches typically separate perception and motion, which can be effective in controlled settings but may fail under occlusions, fast ball movements, and complex opponent interactions, since perception is not directly optimized for control. We propose an integrated approach in which a temporal depth encoder is embedded into a reinforcement learning policy through a task-specific projection layer. We apply this framework to a simulated Booster T1 humanoid robot and show that it is possible to learn vision-based, opponent-aware dribbling directly from depth observations, without explicit state estimation or privileged scene information. The learned policy achieves 100% success in nominal target-driven dribbling and 96% success with a single static obstacle, while reaching 46% success against an actively moving ball-attacker opponent. These results demonstrate that the proposed framework supports robust vision-based dribbling in nominal and moderately dynamic settings, and provides a strong foundation for handling more challenging moving-adversary scenarios.

Source

Originally published at arxiv.org.

Related Articles

• Autonomous Tracking and Terminal Guidance of Moving Targets for Fixed-Wing UAVs
• Expert Knowledge-driven Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Racing via Trajectory Guidance and Dynamics Constraints
• Analysis of Mutual and Referential Human and Robot Gazes in a Collaborative Word Association Game