TWIST

TWIST

[CoRL 2025] | [Website] [Arxiv] [Video]

@article{ze2025twist,
title={TWIST: Teleoperated Whole-Body Imitation System},
author= {Yanjie Ze and Zixuan Chen and João Pedro Araújo and Zi-ang Cao and Xue Bin Peng and Jiajun Wu and C. Karen Liu},
year= {2025},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.02833}
}

Demo 1: diverse loco-manipulation skills by TWIST.

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/7c2b874e-e713-47e1-8e84-0efb93c419b5

Demo 2: a video recording showing the low-level controller and high-level motion sender in TWIST (fully reproduced in this repo)

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/4953b6de-5c84-4a4b-9391-75818903a654

News

• [2025.09.29] TWIST is fully open-sourced, including 1) training motion datasets, 2) training code for both teacher & student policy, 3) sim2sim & sim2real scripts, 4) model checkpoint here, i.e., a general motion tracker.
• [2025.08.04] Real-time retargeting is released. See GMR.
• [2025.08.01] TWIST is accpeted by CoRL 2025.

Installation

The training can be run on a single Nvidia RTX 4090 with 24G memory in 1~2 days.

1. Create conda environment:

conda env remove -n twist
conda create -n twist python=3.8
conda activate twist

2. Install isaacgym. Download from official link and then install it:

cd isaacgym/python && pip install -e .

3. Install packages:

cd rsl_rl && pip install -e . && cd ..
cd legged_gym && pip install -e . && cd ..
pip install "numpy==1.23.0" pydelatin wandb tqdm opencv-python ipdb pyfqmr flask dill gdown hydra-core imageio[ffmpeg] mujoco mujoco-python-viewer isaacgym-stubs pytorch-kinematics rich termcolor 
pip install redis[hiredis]
pip install pyttsx3 # for voice control
cd pose && pip install -e . && cd ..

remember to start redis server on your computer:

redis-server --daemonize yes

if you wanna do sim2real, you also need to install unitree_sdk2py.

git clone https://github.com/unitreerobotics/unitree_sdk2_python.git
cd unitree_sdk2_python
pip3 install -e .

4. Download TWIST dataset from my google drive [Small note: if you use this dataset in your project, please also add proper citation to this work]. Unzip it to anywhere you like, and specify the root_path in legged_gym/motion_data_configs/twist_dataset.yaml to the unzipped folder.

5. Ready for training & deployment!

Usage

We have provided the trained student ckpt in assets/twist_general_motion_tracker.pt. You can directly use it for deployment.

And we have also provided full motion datasets to ensure you can successfully train our teacher & student policy.

1. Training teacher policy via RL:

bash train_teacher.sh 0927_twist_teacher cuda:0

• arg 1: teacher policy expid
• arg 2: cuda device id

2. Training student policy via RL+BC (make sure the teacher policy expid is the same above)

bash train_student.sh 0927_twist_rlbcstu 0927_twist_teacher cuda:0

• arg 1: student policy expid
• arg 2: teacher policy expid
• arg 3: cuda device id

3. Export student policy to jit model:

bash to_jit.sh 0927_twist_rlbcstu

• arg 1: student policy expid

You should see something like this:

Saved traced_actor at /home/yanjieze/projects/g1_wbc/TWIST-clean/legged_gym/logs/g1_stu_rl/0927_twist_rlbcstu/traced/0927_twist_rlbcstu-47500-jit.pt
Robot: g1

4. Sim2sim verification:

[If this is your first time to run this script] you need to warm up the redis server by running the high-level motion server.

cd deploy_real
python server_high_level_motion_lib.py --motion_file PATH/TO/YOUR/MOTION/FILE

You can just select one motion file from our motion dataset.

Then, you can run the low-level simulation server.

python server_low_level_g1_sim.py --policy_path PATH/TO/YOUR/JIT/MODEL

• This will start a simulation that runs the low-level controller only.
• This is because we separate the high-level control (i.e., teleop) from the low-level control (i.e., RL policy).
• You should now be able to see the robot stand still.

And now you can control the robot via high-level motion server.

python server_high_level_motion_lib.py --motion_file PATH/TO/YOUR/MOTION/FILE --vis

5. Sim2real verification. If you are not familiar with the deployment on physical robot, you can refer to unitree_g1.md or unitree_g1.zh.md for more details.

More specifically, the pipeline for sim2real deploy is:

1. start the robot and connect the robot and your laptop via an Ethernet cable.
2. config the corresponding net interface on your laptop, by setting the IP address as 192.168.123.222 and the netmask as 255.255.255.0.
3. now you should be able to ping the robot via ping 192.168.123.164.
4. then use Unitree G1's remote control to enter dev mode, i.e., press the L2+R2 key combination.
5. now you should be able to see the robot joints in the damping state.
6. then you can run the low-level controller by:

cd deploy_real
python server_low_level_g1_real.py --policy_path PATH/TO/YOUR/JIT/MODEL --net YOUR_NET_INTERFACE_TO_UNITREE_ROBOT

Similarly, you run the low-level controller first and then control the robot via high-level motion server.

python server_high_level_motion_lib.py --motion_file PATH/TO/YOUR/MOTION/FILE --vis

6. Real-time teleop. We provide a legacy version we use in May 2025 here: deploy_real/server_motion_optitrack_v2 (legacy).py.

• As later we have upgraded to use GMR for real-time teleop, you can first check GMR for real-time motion retargeting. After you can successfully run GMR with your MoCap, it would be very easy to modify our provided script to your setting.
• The teleop script could be further improved. We are preparing to release the new version soon, and this old teleop script will be only used for your reference.

Q & A

Q: How to use a new retargeted motion pkl file from GMR? I checked the numpy version and found that TWIST numpy version is 1.23.0, but GMR numpy version is 2.2.6. I guess this version mismatch causes compatibility issues

A: see issue#10.

Contact

If you have any questions, please contact me at [email protected].