While recent advances in humanoid locomotion have achieved stable walking on varied terrains, capturing the agility and adaptivity of highly dynamic human motions remains an open challenge. In particular, agile parkour in complex environments demands not only low-level robustness, but also human-like motion expressiveness, long-horizon skill composition, and perception-driven decision-making. In this paper, we present Perceptive Humanoid Parkour (PHP), a modular framework that enables humanoid robots to autonomously perform long-horizon, vision-based parkour across challenging obstacle courses. Our approach first leverages motion matching, formulated as nearest-neighbor search in a feature space, to compose retargeted atomic human skills into long-horizon kinematic trajectories. This framework enables the flexible composition and smooth transition of complex skill chains while preserving the elegance and fluidity of dynamic human motions. Next, we train motion-tracking reinforcement learning (RL) expert policies for these composed motions, and distill them into a single depth-based, multi-skill student policy, using a combination of DAgger and RL. Crucially, the combination of perception and skill composition enables autonomous, context-aware decision-making: using only onboard depth sensing and a discrete 2D velocity command, the robot selects and executes whether to step over, climb onto, vault or roll off obstacles of varying geometries and heights. We validate our framework with extensive real-world experiments on a Unitree G1 humanoid robot, demonstrating highly dynamic parkour skills such as climbing tall obstacles up to 1.25m (96% robot height), as well as long-horizon multi-obstacle traversal with closed-loop adaptation to real-time obstacle perturbations.
Figures & tables
Fig. 2: Perceptive Humanoid Parkour overview. Atomic parkour skills are composed into long-horizon kinematic reference trajectories via motion matching. Single-skill teacher policies are trained with privileged information using RL-based motion tracking. Multiple teachers are distilled into a single depth-based student policy using a hybrid DAgger and RL objective. This scalable recipe enables zero-shot sim-to-real transfer onto a physical humanoid robot that adaptively traverses through complex terrains by autonomously executing highly agile parkour skills using onboard perception.
Fig. 3: Diverse variations of composed parkour skills synthesized via motion matching. (a) Different approach distances trigger varying stride phases and entry poses. (b) Diverse locomotion speeds, directions, and durations. (c) Randomized terrain poses and shapes.
Fig. 4: Side-by-side comparison of high-climb agility. The robot climbs onto a 1.25 m wall within 3.63 s.
Fig. 5: Hardware results demonstrating agile, long-horizon parkour behaviors, including (a) a cat vault, (b) a drop landing from a 1.25 m wall, and (c) a 48-second terrain traversal with online adaptation to real-time obstacle displacement.
Commanded Velocity
1.0 m/s
2.0 m/s
36 cm
58 cm
76 cm
36 cm
58 cm
76 cm
Velocity Tracking
1.00
0.00
0.00
1.00
0.00
0.00
Uncomposed Data
0.06
0.02
0.00
0.37
0.27
0.07
End-to-end Depth
0.95
0.07
0.08
0.78
0.19
0.14
Ours
1.00
0.99
0.95
1.00
0.99
0.95
TABLE I: Baseline success rate on parkour tasks with different commanded speeds and obstacle heights.
Method
1.0 m/s
2.0 m/s
58 cm
76 cm
94 cm
36 cm
58 cm
76 cm
Extreme Distances
0.99
0.62
0.64
0.98
0.60
0.58
Half Density
0.95
0.32
0.57
0.99
0.85
0.81
DAgger Only
0.16
0.03
0.12
0.63
0.09
0.10
DAgger & Alive Reward
1.00
0.90
0.96
0.94
0.91
0.84
DAgger & Root Tracking
1.00
0.79
0.75
1.00
0.92
0.87
TABLE II: Success rate on parkour tasks with different motion matching densities and RL strategies during distillation.
Skill
Duration (s)
Locomotion
Locomotion
495.5
Parkour skills @ 1.0 m/s
Step (36 cm)
2.2
Climb (58 cm)
12.1
Climb (76 cm)
8.8
TABLE III: Motion clips used in our motion library.