{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/slomo-a-general-system-for-legged-robot","title":"SLoMo: A General System for Legged Robot Motion Imitation from Casual Videos","arxiv_id":"2304.14389","date":"2023-04-27","proceeding":null,"authors":["John Z. Zhang","Shuo Yang","Gengshan Yang","Arun L. Bishop","Deva Ramanan","Zachary Manchester"],"abstract":"We present SLoMo: a first-of-its-kind framework for transferring skilled motions from casually captured \"in the wild\" video footage of humans and animals to legged robots. SLoMo works in three stages: 1) synthesize a physically plausible reconstructed key-point trajectory from monocular videos; 2) optimize a dynamically feasible reference trajectory for the robot offline that includes body and foot motion, as well as contact sequences that closely tracks the key points; 3) track the reference trajectory online using a general-purpose model-predictive controller on robot hardware. Traditional motion imitation for legged motor skills often requires expert animators, collaborative demonstrations, and/or expensive motion capture equipment, all of which limits scalability. Instead, SLoMo only relies on easy-to-obtain monocular video footage, readily available in online repositories such as YouTube. It converts videos into motion primitives that can be executed reliably by real-world robots. We demonstrate our approach by transferring the motions of cats, dogs, and humans to example robots including a quadruped (on hardware) and a humanoid (in simulation). To the best knowledge of the authors, this is the first attempt at a general-purpose motion transfer framework that imitates animal and human motions on legged robots directly from casual videos without artificial markers or labels.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.14389v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.14389v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"slomo-a-general-system-for-legged-robot","repo_url":"https://github.com/johnzhang3/slomo","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT"}}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2304.14389","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}