Unitree G1 taught to drive an office chair with its feet: seated humanoid locomotion
ChongZzZhang · x · 2026-09-03
Researchers placed a Unitree G1 on a plain caster office chair and trained it to propel itself omnidirectionally with its feet — no chair motors, no contact sensing at deployment, just proprioception and velocity commands, with zero-shot sim-to-real transfer.
The paper 'Stay Seated' (arXiv:2608.28090) argues humanoid locomotion doesn't have to mean walking. Policies learn without motion-imitation rewards; the best seated policies even outperformed a standing policy in velocity tracking. Ablations across four seeds show foot-slip regularization cuts cost-of-transport but can converge to stationary local optima unless paired with symmetry regularization or a command curriculum.
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