Hiking in the Wild: A Scalable Perceptive Parkour
Framework for Humanoids

* Equal contribution  † Corresponding author

Run up/down platform

Run on Grassy Ramp

Stairs

High Platform

Grassy Ramp

Gap

Long-duration Walking

Hovering over the video will play it at 1x speed.

Abstract

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.

BibTeX

@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}, 
}