UniReLo: Learning a Unified Humanoid Policy from Fall Recovery to Locomotion across Diverse Terrains

Abstract

Reliable fall recovery, which commonly aims at attaining a nominal upright posture, is essential for the autonomous operation of humanoid robots in unstructured field environments. Although existing posture-centered methods can synthesize coordinated whole-body recovery motions from diverse fallen configurations, they may result in a dynamically fragile support state, leading to secondary loss of balance or unstable resumption of commanded locomotion, particularly under terrain-dependent contact conditions. We propose to learn a unified humanoid policy from fall recovery to locomotion (UniReLo) across heterogeneous field terrains. UniReLo leverages continuously gated multi-scale motion priors to modulate frame-, sequence-, and gait-level adversarial supervision according to recovery progress, preserving the distinct temporal structures of recovery and locomotion without requiring fixed-threshold switching. In addition, terrain-conditioned recovery guidance evaluates the evolving support state using a terrain-relative support representation and support-feasibility assessment. Simulation and outdoor real-world experiments demonstrate that UniReLo can deliver stable and continuous recovery-to-locomotion behaviors for humanoids across diverse field terrains. The supplementary video is available at https://vsislab.github.io/UniReLo/.