I'm Louis Le Lay, a robotics engineer. At PAL Robotics, I owned the RL locomotion effort for the Kangaroo humanoid end-to-end: built the full pipeline from scratch and replaced the MPC-based walk the company had used for over 20 years. The stack is open source.
I also contributed to the creation of mjlab [ tweet ], an Isaac Lab-style RL framework built on MuJoCo Warp, and I'm an active contributor to Isaac Lab.
I'm working toward humanoid robots that move through the real world with the agility and robustness of humans.
Experience
Owned the RL locomotion effort for the Kangaroo humanoid end-to-end. Built the full sim-to-real pipeline from scratch, led the technical direction, and replaced the legacy MPC-based walker with a learned policy. Olivier Stasse (Research Director, LAAS-CNRS) referenced my work on stage at VivaTech 2026 during a live humanoid demo.
Publications
For a complete and up-to-date list, see my Google Scholar.
Software
Press & Mentions
- VivaTech 2026 — Live Demo with PAL Robotics × LAAS — Referenced by Olivier Stasse (Research Director, LAAS-CNRS) for my work on Kangaroo's RL locomotion. Jun 2026. [ video ]
Talks
- From Arms to Humanoids: an RL Journey — Invited talk at INIT Robots Lab, Apr 2026.
- Teaching a Full-Size Humanoid to Walk with RL, from Scratch — Master's thesis defense, Sorbonne University, Apr 2026.
- Training and Deploying RL Agents for Manipulation on the SO-ARM — Talk at ROSCon España, Nov 2025.
Education
- Sorbonne University · Master of Engineering, Robotics — 2022 – 2025
- ÉTS Montréal · Dual Degree, Information Technology — 2024 – 2025