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Main Authors: Mishra, Prakhar, Raj, Amir Hossain, Xiao, Xuesu, Manocha, Dinesh
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.18418
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author Mishra, Prakhar
Raj, Amir Hossain
Xiao, Xuesu
Manocha, Dinesh
author_facet Mishra, Prakhar
Raj, Amir Hossain
Xiao, Xuesu
Manocha, Dinesh
contents We present Morphology-Control-Aware Reinforcement Learning (McARL), a new approach to overcome challenges of hyperparameter tuning and transfer loss, enabling generalizable locomotion across robot morphologies. We use a morphology-conditioned policy by incorporating a randomized morphology vector, sampled from a defined morphology range, into both the actor and critic networks. This allows the policy to learn parameters that generalize to robots with similar characteristics. We demonstrate that a single policy trained on a Unitree Go1 robot using McARL can be transferred to a different morphology (e.g., Unitree Go2 robot) and can achieve zero-shot transfer velocity of up to 3.5 m/s without retraining or fine-tuning. Moreover, it achieves 6.0 m/s on the training Go1 robot and generalizes to other morphologies like A1 and Mini Cheetah. We also analyze the impact of morphology distance on transfer performance and highlight McARL's advantages over prior approaches. McARL achieves 44-150% higher transfer performance on Go2, Mini Cheetah, and A1 compared to PPO variants.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_18418
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle McARL:Morphology-Control-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Generalizable Quadrupedal Locomotion
Mishra, Prakhar
Raj, Amir Hossain
Xiao, Xuesu
Manocha, Dinesh
Robotics
We present Morphology-Control-Aware Reinforcement Learning (McARL), a new approach to overcome challenges of hyperparameter tuning and transfer loss, enabling generalizable locomotion across robot morphologies. We use a morphology-conditioned policy by incorporating a randomized morphology vector, sampled from a defined morphology range, into both the actor and critic networks. This allows the policy to learn parameters that generalize to robots with similar characteristics. We demonstrate that a single policy trained on a Unitree Go1 robot using McARL can be transferred to a different morphology (e.g., Unitree Go2 robot) and can achieve zero-shot transfer velocity of up to 3.5 m/s without retraining or fine-tuning. Moreover, it achieves 6.0 m/s on the training Go1 robot and generalizes to other morphologies like A1 and Mini Cheetah. We also analyze the impact of morphology distance on transfer performance and highlight McARL's advantages over prior approaches. McARL achieves 44-150% higher transfer performance on Go2, Mini Cheetah, and A1 compared to PPO variants.
title McARL:Morphology-Control-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Generalizable Quadrupedal Locomotion
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.18418