Paper Detail
Lizhi Yang, Junheng Li, Aaron D. Ames
We present PAC-MAN, a perception-aware CBF-RL framework that couples control-barrier safety with deployment-realistic onboard sensing for whole-body humanoid dodgeball. The deployed policy sees the ball only as segmentation-masked depth from a head-mounted camera, while training-time CBF guidance represents clearance to every body link, and an adversarial motion prior regularizes the resulting evasive reflexes. We evaluate on a controlled any-link contact benchmark with seeded throws in two regimes: single throws and a deployment loop in which the robot walks back to its station and recovers between throws. On this benchmark, the policy comes within a few points of a privileged state oracle: a fixed onboard camera alone is adequate for evasion. We find that usable barrier structure depends on perceptual observability: Joint-CBF gives the best performance with accurate ball states, degrades under fixed-camera observations when used only as training guidance, and recovers with a ball-tracking gimbal or privileged runtime filter. We therefore deploy a lightweight Link-CBF policy zero-shot on the Unitree G1 in the real world, where it tolerates imperfect perception, succeeds on 95% of throws, and uses semantic segmentation to dodge different balls.
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@article{yang2026pac,
title = {PAC-MAN: Perception-Aware CBF-RL for Whole-Body Safety in Humanoid Dodgeball},
author = {Lizhi Yang and Junheng Li and Aaron D. Ames},
year = {2026},
abstract = {We present PAC-MAN, a perception-aware CBF-RL framework that couples control-barrier safety with deployment-realistic onboard sensing for whole-body humanoid dodgeball. The deployed policy sees the ball only as segmentation-masked depth from a head-mounted camera, while training-time CBF guidance represents clearance to every body link, and an adversarial motion prior regularizes the resulting evasive reflexes. We evaluate on a controlled any-link contact benchmark with seeded throws in two regi},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.28623},
keywords = {cs.RO, cs.AI, Computer science, USable, Artificial intelligence, Computer vision, Humanoid robot},
eprint = {2607.28623},
archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}
{}