g1-navigation-dagger

G1 Navigation Policy (DAgger Distillation)

Vision-based navigation policies for the Unitree G1 humanoid robot, trained using teacher-student DAgger distillation.

Model Description

This repository contains two PyTorch TorchScript models:

Architecture

Both policies use a 3-layer MLP with ELU activations:

• Student: [82] → 256 → 128 → 64 → [3]
• Teacher: [34] → 256 → 128 → 64 → [3]

Observation Spaces

Student (82-dim):

• Depth rays: 72 dims (±70° FOV, corrupted with noise/dropout)
• Robot velocity (vx, vy, ω): 3 dims
• Goal relative position: 2 dims
• Goal distance & angle: 2 dims
• Previous action: 3 dims

Teacher (34-dim):

• Nearest obstacles: 8 × 3 = 24 dims (x, y, distance)
• Robot velocity: 3 dims
• Goal relative + distance/angle: 4 dims
• Previous action: 3 dims

Action Space

Velocity commands: [vx, vy, ω]

• vx ∈ [-0.6, 1.0] m/s (forward/backward)
• vy ∈ [-0.5, 0.5] m/s (lateral)
• ω ∈ [-1.57, 1.57] rad/s (yaw rate)

Training Details

Two-Stage Pipeline

1. Stage 1: Teacher PPO - Train privileged teacher with ground-truth obstacles using PPO (2000 iterations)
2. Stage 2: DAgger Distillation - Distill teacher to student using Dataset Aggregation with 70% → 20% teacher mixing decay

Key Innovations

• FOV Randomization: fov_keep_ratio ∈ [0.35, 1.0] prevents sensor overfitting
• Hardcase Curriculum: Mine failure trajectories, retrain with 35% hardcase resets
• Symmetry Augmentation: 50% mirror transform eliminates left/right bias
• Runtime Safety Layer: Distance-based velocity scaling for collision avoidance

Performance

Real Robot Validation

Usage

import torch

# Load student policy (for deployment)
student = torch.jit.load("student_policy.pt")
student.eval()

# Prepare observation (82-dim)
obs = torch.zeros(1, 82)  # [depth_rays(72), vel(3), goal_rel(2), goal_dist_angle(2), prev_action(3)]

# Get action
with torch.no_grad():
    action = student(obs)  # [vx, vy, omega]

Training Environment

• Simulator: NVIDIA IsaacLab (Isaac Sim 4.5)
• Arena: 8m × 8m with 24-32 cylindrical obstacles
• Control Rate: 10 Hz policy / 50 Hz physics
• Robot: Unitree G1 (capsule proxy in sim, full robot for real deployment)

Citation

If you use this model, please cite:

@misc{g1-navigation-dagger-2026,
  title={Teacher-Student Distillation via DAgger for Sim-to-Real Navigation on the Unitree G1},
  author={Adjimavo},
  year={2026},
  url={https://huggingface.co/Adjimavo/g1-navigation-dagger}
}

License

Apache 2.0