World’s first heavy humanoid demonstrated climbing unfamiliar staircases with a 5 kg payload

Meet VR-M3 by VinRobotics - a ~60 kg humanoid capable of navigating real-world stairs at 0.6 m/s using fully onboard terrain sensing and a learned locomotion policy, without LiDAR, motion capture, teleoperation, or pre-mapped environments. Using first-person terrain perception fused in real time, VR-M3 builds a 3D understanding of the terrain ahead, evaluates foothold quality, and dynamically adapts every step for balance and stability. When carrying additional weight, the robot autonomously becomes more cautious - shortening stride length and selecting safer footholds in real time.

Trained entirely in simulation and deployed through zero-shot sim2real transfer, the policy generalizes across varying stair geometries directly on physical hardware. While most recent perceptive stair-climbing humanoids are demonstrated on significantly lighter platforms, VR-M3 pushes the frontier further with higher mass, larger payload capacity, and a minimalist single-camera setup.