OmniMimic: Dynamics-completed Motion Augmentation for Multi-style Omnidirectional Quadruped Locomotion
Authors: Sheng Wu, Guoqiang Zhao, Zhe Yang, Fei Teng, Zhikun Zhou, Yanlin Yang, Zheng Fang, Hong Zheng, +2 more
Organizations: School of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Hunan University, China · China Mobile Group Hunan Company Ltd., China · National Engineering Research Center of Robot Visual Perception and Control Technology, Hunan University, China
Animal demonstrations provide quadruped robots with natural and distinctive gait styles that are difficult to specify through hand-crafted rewards. However, their narrow directional coverage leaves little style-consistent supervision for backward, lateral, and turning commands. We present OmniMimic, a training framework that turns directionally limited animal demonstrations into a single multi-gait policy over target per-axis velocity ranges. OmniMimic first combines temporal reversal, constrained dynamics completion, and sagittal reflection to construct robot-specific kinematic and physical supervision beyond the observed directions. It then expands commands progressively from the demonstrated velocity distribution toward the target per-axis bounds, and uses a shared actor with soft-gated, gait-specialized residual experts to balance reusable locomotion skills with gait-specific corrections. Across four gaits in simulation, OmniMimic reduces mean foot-position RMSE at forward and backward reference velocities by 12.9% and velocity-tracking RMSE on a uniform Cartesian command grid by 63.1%, compared with the matched APEX baseline. The project page is at https://OmniMimic.github.io.
We present MimicAgent, a prompt-to-trajectory generation framework for learning dynamic quadruped skills. Although reward shaping is extensively used when training quadruped policies, navigating the resulting reward landscape is notoriously difficult, requiring hours of "graduate student descent". Eureka attempts to automate reward design with LLMs, but we find that it struggles to generalize across diverse skills and morphologies. Our key observation is that it is far easier for a human - and by association, an LLM - to generate reference motions than to shape reward functions. Our hypothesis is motivated by the success of example-guided RL for humanoids, which exploits large-scale motion capture datasets as references for training locomotion policies. Unlike humanoids, quadrupeds lack such reference motion data. Towards this end, we propose MimicAgent, an agentic harness that, given a skill prompt, generates quadruped reference trajectories with coding agents. These coarse reference trajectories are then used to train example-guided RL policies that are deployable in simulation and in the real-world. Notably, we find that when prompting Claude Fable 5.1 within our agentic harness, 87% of prompts yield semantically aligned reference trajectories.
Lucky Kant Nayak, Narayanan Palghat Parameswaran, Neehar Peri +1
Quadruped robots have achieved remarkable locomotion, yet their behavioral repertoire remains confined to a few gaits--far from the expressive, companion-like presence long envisioned for them. Attempts to import the humanoid recipe of large-scale motion data have inherited one tacit assumption: that robot motion must first pass through an animal body, making data collection dependent on cooperative animals, reconstruction fragile across species, and retargeting ill-posed across incompatible morphologies. We propose Uni-Mo, a fully automated pipeline that removes the animal from the loop by reframing data scarcity as a generation problem: an LLM proposes motion prompts, a video diffusion model synthesizes the corresponding robot behaviors, and the generated videos are lifted into 3D reference trajectories used to train tracking policies deployed on a real Unitree Go2. To make naively-drifting generations reliably extractable, we introduce an Identity Consistency Loss that enforces appearance coherence across frames. We release Quad-Imaginarium at https://github.com/Amap-Robotics/Quad-Imaginarium, the resulting open-source dataset of 7,488 language-annotated quadruped motions (18.5 hours) spanning acrobatic and performative behaviors. We validate 392 randomly sampled motions on a real Unitree Go2 with a 96.7% deployment success rate, complemented by a 97.6% success rate across the full dataset in simulation.
Reinforcement learning combined with imitation learning has significantly advanced biomimetic quadrupedal locomotion. However, scaling these frameworks to massive, multi-source datasets exposes fundamental bottlenecks. First, traditional GAN-based discriminators are prone to mode collapse, struggling to capture diverse motion distributions from uncurated datasets. Second, existing kinematic priors suffer from out-of-distribution (OOD) tracking conflicts, leading to severe unintended heading drifts during complex maneuvers. Furthermore, deploying unconstrained priors to physical hardware poses critical safety risks by disregarding actuator dynamics. To overcome these challenges, we propose Diff-CAST (Diffusion-guided Constraint-Aware Symmetric Tracking), a novel motion prior framework leveraging the multi-modal distribution modeling capabilities of diffusion models for stylistic rewards. Diff-CAST effectively replaces traditional GAN discriminators, unlocking robust data scaling on heterogeneous collections. To ensure high-fidelity intent execution and reliable real-world deployment, we introduce a comprehensive Sim2Real architecture integrating Symmetric Augmented Command Conditioning (SACC) for drift-free tracking, and Constrained RL for hardware safety. Experiments on a quadruped demonstrate that Diff-CAST mitigates mode collapse, enables seamless transitions between diverse skills, and ensures robust, hardware-compliant locomotion.