Hovering over the video will play it at 1x speed.
Achieving robust humanoid hiking in complex, unstructured environments requires transitioning from reactive proprioception to proactive perception. However, integrating exteroception remains a significant challenge: mapping-based methods suffer from state estimation drift; for instance, LiDAR-based methods do not handle torso jitter well. Existing end-to-end approaches often struggle with scalability and training complexity; specifically, some previous works using virtual obstacles are implemented case-by-case. In this work, we present Hiking in the Wild, a scalable, end-to-end perceptive parkour framework designed for robust humanoid hiking. To ensure safety and training stability, we introduce two key mechanisms: a foothold safety mechanism combining scalable Terrain Edge Detection with Foot Volume Points to prevent catastrophic slippage on edges, and a Flat Patch Sampling strategy that eliminates reward hacking by generating feasible navigation targets. Our approach utilizes a single-stage reinforcement learning scheme, mapping raw depth inputs and proprioception directly to joint actions, without relying on external state estimation. Extensive field experiments on a full-size humanoid demonstrate that our policy enables robust traversal of complex terrains at speeds up to 2.5 m/s. The training and deployment code is open-sourced to facilitate reproducible research and deployment on real robots with minimal hardware modifications.
@misc{zhu2026hiking,
title={Hiking in the Wild: A Scalable Perceptive Parkour Framework for Humanoids},
author={Shaoting Zhu and Ziwen Zhuang and Mengjie Zhao and Kun-Ying Lee and Hang Zhao},
year={2026},
eprint={2601.07718},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
primaryClass={cs.RO},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.07718},
}