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arXiv · 2503.04613

Whole-Body Model-Predictive Control of Legged Robots with MuJoCo

John Z. Zhang·Taylor A. Howell·Zeji Yi·Chaoyi Pan·Guanya Shi·Guannan Qu·Tom Erez·Yuval Tassa·Zachary Manchester
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Abstract

We demonstrate the surprising real-world effectiveness of a very simple approach to whole-body model-predictive control (MPC) of quadruped and humanoid robots: the iterative LQR (iLQR) algorithm with MuJoCo dynamics and finite-difference approximated derivatives. Building upon the previous success of model-based behavior synthesis and control of locomotion and manipulation tasks with MuJoCo in simulation, we show that these policies can easily generalize to the real world with few sim-to-real considerations. Our baseline method achieves real-time whole-body MPC on a variety of hardware experiments, including dynamic quadruped locomotion, quadruped walking on two legs, and full-sized humanoid bipedal locomotion. We hope this easy-to-reproduce hardware baseline lowers the barrier to entry for real-world whole-body MPC research and contributes to accelerating research velocity in the community. Our code and experiment videos will be available online at:https://johnzhang3.github.io/mujoco_ilqr

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John Z. Zhang, Taylor A. Howell, Zeji Yi, Chaoyi Pan, Guanya Shi, Guannan Qu, Tom Erez, Yuval Tassa, Zachary Manchester. 2025-03-06. Whole-Body Model-Predictive Control of Legged Robots with MuJoCo. https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.04613

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