soccerbot: Learning Humanoid Soccer Skills with Latent Motion Priors

The authors propose soccerbot, a hierarchical reinforcement learning framework that distills a structured latent motion prior from large-scale human soccer motion capture data, constraining policy learning within a dynamically feasible motion manifold. A single skill-conditioned policy thereby learns moving, dribbling, trapping, and kicking in a unified way, while maintaining human-like motion and fluid transitions during skill switching. After robustness-oriented simulation design, the framework transfers zero-shot to the Unitree G1 humanoid robot, completing the full soccer skill set in real-world environments.