SONIC-K1: Porting a Universal Humanoid Motion Tracker to a Small Humanoid on a Single GPU

Abstract

We present SONIC-K1, to our knowledge the first open-weights whole-body motion tracker for the Booster K1 humanoid, obtained by adapting the SONIC framework to this smaller robot. The policy is trained from scratch on a single shared GPU with a small fraction of the compute reported for SONIC. In MuJoCo simulation, it tracks nearly all held-out motion clips and performs well on external benchmarks under SONIC's success criterion. On the real K1, it tracks upper-body and slow motions, while stepping and turning remain less reliable, and simulation experiments show a sensitivity to action latency. These results show broad motion-tracking capability on a modest training budget and point to quantitative hardware evaluation as the main next step. Code, policy weights and evaluation tools are publicly available.