Revisiting Reward Design and Evaluation for Robust Humanoid Standing and Walking

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: van Marum, Bart, Shrestha, Aayam, Duan, Helei, Dugar, Pranay, Dao, Jeremy, Fern, Alan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866916375162781696
author van Marum, Bart
Shrestha, Aayam
Duan, Helei
Dugar, Pranay
Dao, Jeremy
Fern, Alan
author_facet van Marum, Bart
Shrestha, Aayam
Duan, Helei
Dugar, Pranay
Dao, Jeremy
Fern, Alan
contents A necessary capability for humanoid robots is the ability to stand and walk while rejecting natural disturbances. Recent progress has been made using sim-to-real reinforcement learning (RL) to train such locomotion controllers, with approaches differing mainly in their reward functions. However, prior works lack a clear method to systematically test new reward functions and compare controller performance through repeatable experiments. This limits our understanding of the trade-offs between approaches and hinders progress. To address this, we propose a low-cost, quantitative benchmarking method to evaluate and compare the real-world performance of standing and walking (SaW) controllers on metrics like command following, disturbance recovery, and energy efficiency. We also revisit reward function design and construct a minimally constraining reward function to train SaW controllers. We experimentally verify that our benchmarking framework can identify areas for improvement, which can be systematically addressed to enhance the policies. We also compare our new controller to state-of-the-art controllers on the Digit humanoid robot. The results provide clear quantitative trade-offs among the controllers and suggest directions for future improvements to the reward functions and expansion of the benchmarks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_19173
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Revisiting Reward Design and Evaluation for Robust Humanoid Standing and Walking
van Marum, Bart
Shrestha, Aayam
Duan, Helei
Dugar, Pranay
Dao, Jeremy
Fern, Alan
Robotics
A necessary capability for humanoid robots is the ability to stand and walk while rejecting natural disturbances. Recent progress has been made using sim-to-real reinforcement learning (RL) to train such locomotion controllers, with approaches differing mainly in their reward functions. However, prior works lack a clear method to systematically test new reward functions and compare controller performance through repeatable experiments. This limits our understanding of the trade-offs between approaches and hinders progress. To address this, we propose a low-cost, quantitative benchmarking method to evaluate and compare the real-world performance of standing and walking (SaW) controllers on metrics like command following, disturbance recovery, and energy efficiency. We also revisit reward function design and construct a minimally constraining reward function to train SaW controllers. We experimentally verify that our benchmarking framework can identify areas for improvement, which can be systematically addressed to enhance the policies. We also compare our new controller to state-of-the-art controllers on the Digit humanoid robot. The results provide clear quantitative trade-offs among the controllers and suggest directions for future improvements to the reward functions and expansion of the benchmarks.
title Revisiting Reward Design and Evaluation for Robust Humanoid Standing and Walking
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.19173