MESSI Motion Estimation for Soccer Skill Imitation
We started with a pretty simple question: can one recorded human soccer kick become one believable robot skill? So we built MESSI: Motion Estimation for Soccer Skill Imitation. It takes a SoccerKicks penalty clip, uses the dataset’s 3D pose annotations, retargets the motion onto a Unitree G1 humanoid, and then checks the result in MuJoCo with a real ball, goal, contact, and friction. The hard part is that you can’t just copy human joints onto a robot. The bodies are different, the joint limits are different, and a kick only matters if the ball actually moves the way it should. So we used the human motion as the starting point, refined the trajectory with AMD MI300X / ROCm, and treated MuJoCo as the final test instead of just trusting a proxy metric. We also built a Goalie Lab where you can move the keeper and run a fresh physics rollout to see if the learned kick still scores.
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