Yifei Chen(陈逸飞)

Yifei Chen(陈逸飞)

“He/him”

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Unitree G1 Humanoid Motion Control Deployment

Published:

Organization: STARBOT INC — Santa Barbara, United States
Role: Humanoid Motion Control Algorithm Engineer
Duration: Jun 2025 – Aug 2025

Overview

Designed and deployed a comprehensive high- and low-level control system for the Unitree G1 humanoid robot, integrating dual-arm manipulation with Dex3 hands, whole-body locomotion policies from simulation (PBHC), and safety-checked real-time multi-policy switching.


Highlights

  • 🦾 Dual-Arm + Dex3 Manipulation:
    Implemented coordinated arm-hand control with joint space & workspace trajectory recording/replay, triggered via gamepad or vision-based QR detection.

  • ⚙️ Whole-Body Motion Deployment:
    Executed locomotion and stance policies trained in simulation on the real robot, with safe state transitions and automatic fallback.

  • 🔁 Multi-Policy ONNX Pipeline:
    Built runtime switching between locomotion and stance controllers with hardware torque/velocity limit checks.

  • 📐 Advanced IK Integration:
    Combined Pinocchio and CasADi for smooth inverse kinematics solutions in coordinated arm control.

  • 📷 Vision-Based Triggers:
    Integrated RealSense + QRDet for spatially-aware and angle-gated teleoperation sequence triggering.


Technical Contributions

  1. High-Level Arm Controller:
    • Gesture switching (DEFAULT, GRIP, RELEASE) with Dex3 torque and position control.
    • File-based trajectory bank for quick replay in both joint and workspace modes.
  2. Whole-Body Motion Deployment:
    • ONNX runtime inference for policies exported from IsaacGym.
    • Multi-policy control with remote button mapping (L1/R1 for policy cycling, auto-return to stance).
  3. Safety Mechanisms:
    • Zero-torque → damping → execution sequence.
    • Automatic abort on excessive torque, velocity, or invalid actions.
    • Fallback damping mode on emergency stop.
  4. Vision & Teleoperation:
    • Real-time QR code detection for remote-triggered actions.
    • Gamepad-controlled operation for safe, interactive testing.


Impact

Enabled STARBOT INC to deploy complex locomotion and manipulation behaviors on the Unitree G1 with robust safety checks, smooth teleoperation, and efficient switching between motion policies — reducing operator intervention and improving development speed.

Robot Github: https://github.com/yifeichen2024/G1_deploy/tree/main

It can implement with language model: