Whole-Body Model-Predictive Control of Legged Robots with MuJoCo

We demonstrate the surprising real-world effectiveness of a very simple approach to whole-body model-predictive control (MPC) of quadruped and humanoid robots: the iterative LQR (iLQR) algorithm with MuJoCo dynamics and finite-difference approximated derivatives. Building upon the previous success of model-based behavior synthesis and control of locomotion and manipulation tasks with MuJoCo in simulation, we show that these policies can easily generalize to the real world with few sim-to-real considerations. Our baseline method achieves real-time whole-body MPC on a variety of hardware experiments, including dynamic quadruped locomotion, quadruped walking on two legs, and full-sized humanoid bipedal locomotion. We hope this easy-to-reproduce hardware baseline lowers the barrier to entry for real-world whole-body MPC research and contributes to accelerating research velocity in the community. Our code and experiment videos will be available online at:this https URL

@article{zhang2025_2503.04613,
  title={ Whole-Body Model-Predictive Control of Legged Robots with MuJoCo },
  author={ John Z. Zhang and Taylor A. Howell and Zeji Yi and Chaoyi Pan and Guanya Shi and Guannan Qu and Tom Erez and Yuval Tassa and Zachary Manchester },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.04613},
  year={ 2025 }
}