Sampling-Based System Identification with Active Exploration for Legged Robot Sim2Real Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Sobanbabu, Nikhil, He, Guanqi, He, Tairan, Yang, Yuxiang, Shi, Guanya
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Sobanbabu, Nikhil
He, Guanqi
He, Tairan
Yang, Yuxiang
Shi, Guanya
author_facet Sobanbabu, Nikhil
He, Guanqi
He, Tairan
Yang, Yuxiang
Shi, Guanya
contents Sim-to-real discrepancies hinder learning-based policies from achieving high-precision tasks in the real world. While Domain Randomization (DR) is commonly used to bridge this gap, it often relies on heuristics and can lead to overly conservative policies with degrading performance when not properly tuned. System Identification (Sys-ID) offers a targeted approach, but standard techniques rely on differentiable dynamics and/or direct torque measurement, assumptions that rarely hold for contact-rich legged systems. To this end, we present SPI-Active (Sampling-based Parameter Identification with Active Exploration), a two-stage framework that estimates physical parameters of legged robots to minimize the sim-to-real gap. SPI-Active robustly identifies key physical parameters through massive parallel sampling, minimizing state prediction errors between simulated and real-world trajectories. To further improve the informativeness of collected data, we introduce an active exploration strategy that maximizes the Fisher Information of the collected real-world trajectories via optimizing the input commands of an exploration policy. This targeted exploration leads to accurate identification and better generalization across diverse tasks. Experiments demonstrate that SPI-Active enables precise sim-to-real transfer of learned policies to the real world, outperforming baselines by 42-63% in various locomotion tasks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_14266
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Sampling-Based System Identification with Active Exploration for Legged Robot Sim2Real Learning
Sobanbabu, Nikhil
He, Guanqi
He, Tairan
Yang, Yuxiang
Shi, Guanya
Robotics
Sim-to-real discrepancies hinder learning-based policies from achieving high-precision tasks in the real world. While Domain Randomization (DR) is commonly used to bridge this gap, it often relies on heuristics and can lead to overly conservative policies with degrading performance when not properly tuned. System Identification (Sys-ID) offers a targeted approach, but standard techniques rely on differentiable dynamics and/or direct torque measurement, assumptions that rarely hold for contact-rich legged systems. To this end, we present SPI-Active (Sampling-based Parameter Identification with Active Exploration), a two-stage framework that estimates physical parameters of legged robots to minimize the sim-to-real gap. SPI-Active robustly identifies key physical parameters through massive parallel sampling, minimizing state prediction errors between simulated and real-world trajectories. To further improve the informativeness of collected data, we introduce an active exploration strategy that maximizes the Fisher Information of the collected real-world trajectories via optimizing the input commands of an exploration policy. This targeted exploration leads to accurate identification and better generalization across diverse tasks. Experiments demonstrate that SPI-Active enables precise sim-to-real transfer of learned policies to the real world, outperforming baselines by 42-63% in various locomotion tasks.
title Sampling-Based System Identification with Active Exploration for Legged Robot Sim2Real Learning
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.14266