Weakly Supervised Discovery of Motion Styles for Compositional Robot Control

Abstract

When a robot possesses more degrees of freedom than a task requires, multiple trajectories can achieve the same objective using distinct motion styles. Compositional robot control aims to preserve a selected style while simultaneously executing an independent task command, effectively balancing these potentially competing objectives. In this paper, we present CODES, a framework for compositional robot control that discovers a coherent style repertoire from diverse recordings and composes it with independent commands. First, motion retargeting maps the recordings to motions executable by the target robot; next, weakly supervised consensus encoding and density-based clustering identify styles within and across recordings without a prescribed count; finally, reinforcement learning trains a policy to compose the discovered styles with independent commands. We evaluate CODES on a Unitree Go2 quadruped across two simulators and physical hardware. Compared to baselines, CODES significantly improves kinematic coherence. Furthermore, our controller successfully tracks velocity commands that generalize beyond the support of the recorded data, exhibiting robust and distinguishable style characteristics during both cross-simulator and real-world hardware deployments. Project website: https://www.proroklab.org/compositional-motion-styles/