SkillX: one RL policy that dribbles, traps and shoots on a real Noetix E1
Humanoid soccer makes one robot balance, move, kick a ball and switch skills over long horizons, and most prior sports pipelines still train each behaviour as a separate stage. SkillX (Noetix Robotics + Tsinghua University, CoRL 2026) instead learns dribbling, trapping and shooting inside a single command-conditioned RL policy. Three designs hold the shared actor together: skill-specific adversarial motion priors give per-skill style rewards, skill-specific critics estimate skill-dependent values, and an object-aware temporal encoder compresses history including ball state. On a real Noetix E1 it chains dribble-into-shoot over long rollouts, deployed first with motion capture supplying base and ball pose, then with onboard vision only (head-mounted ZED2i, visual-inertial odometry, YOLOv8 ball detection). Remove object observations and rewards and the same framework still produces diverse whole-body skills and transitions.
