Humanoid robot surprises scientists by mastering key basketball skills

Researchers at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) have developed a humanoid robot, a Unitree G1 nicknamed “Little Potato,” capable of performing advanced basketball skills such as dribbling, passing, and executing a clean three-step layup. The robot’s fluid and stable movements result from SkillMimic, an AI framework that learns from human demonstrations captured via video and motion-tracking suits. SkillMimic refines these movements through extensive virtual training, enabling the robot to switch smoothly between multiple skills—even transitions not explicitly shown in the training data. During demonstrations, the robot displayed impressive balance and adaptability, quickly recovering after a blocked layup attempt. SkillMimic-V2 addresses key challenges in reinforcement learning from imperfect human motion data by employing three innovations: the Stitched Trajectory Graph (STG) connects similar body positions across different skills to create new transition paths; the State Transition Field (STF) trains the robot to recover from errors by starting