Learning Agile Locomotion on Risky Terrains

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Zhang, Chong, Rudin, Nikita, Hoeller, David, Hutter, Marco
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2023
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author Zhang, Chong
Rudin, Nikita
Hoeller, David
Hutter, Marco
author_facet Zhang, Chong
Rudin, Nikita
Hoeller, David
Hutter, Marco
contents Quadruped robots have shown remarkable mobility on various terrains through reinforcement learning. Yet, in the presence of sparse footholds and risky terrains such as stepping stones and balance beams, which require precise foot placement to avoid falls, model-based approaches are often used. In this paper, we show that end-to-end reinforcement learning can also enable the robot to traverse risky terrains with dynamic motions. To this end, our approach involves training a generalist policy for agile locomotion on disorderly and sparse stepping stones before transferring its reusable knowledge to various more challenging terrains by finetuning specialist policies from it. Given that the robot needs to rapidly adapt its velocity on these terrains, we formulate the task as a navigation task instead of the commonly used velocity tracking which constrains the robot's behavior and propose an exploration strategy to overcome sparse rewards and achieve high robustness. We validate our proposed method through simulation and real-world experiments on an ANYmal-D robot achieving peak forward velocity of >= 2.5 m/s on sparse stepping stones and narrow balance beams. Video: youtu.be/Z5X0J8OH6z4
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2311_10484
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Learning Agile Locomotion on Risky Terrains
Zhang, Chong
Rudin, Nikita
Hoeller, David
Hutter, Marco
Robotics
Quadruped robots have shown remarkable mobility on various terrains through reinforcement learning. Yet, in the presence of sparse footholds and risky terrains such as stepping stones and balance beams, which require precise foot placement to avoid falls, model-based approaches are often used. In this paper, we show that end-to-end reinforcement learning can also enable the robot to traverse risky terrains with dynamic motions. To this end, our approach involves training a generalist policy for agile locomotion on disorderly and sparse stepping stones before transferring its reusable knowledge to various more challenging terrains by finetuning specialist policies from it. Given that the robot needs to rapidly adapt its velocity on these terrains, we formulate the task as a navigation task instead of the commonly used velocity tracking which constrains the robot's behavior and propose an exploration strategy to overcome sparse rewards and achieve high robustness. We validate our proposed method through simulation and real-world experiments on an ANYmal-D robot achieving peak forward velocity of >= 2.5 m/s on sparse stepping stones and narrow balance beams. Video: youtu.be/Z5X0J8OH6z4
title Learning Agile Locomotion on Risky Terrains
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.10484