Learning to Walk with Less: a Dyna-Style Approach to Quadrupedal Locomotion

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Affonso, Francisco, Tommaselli, Felipe Andrade G., Negri, Juliano, Medeiros, Vivian S., Gasparino, Mateus V., Chowdhary, Girish, Becker, Marcelo
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Affonso, Francisco
Tommaselli, Felipe Andrade G.
Negri, Juliano
Medeiros, Vivian S.
Gasparino, Mateus V.
Chowdhary, Girish
Becker, Marcelo
author_facet Affonso, Francisco
Tommaselli, Felipe Andrade G.
Negri, Juliano
Medeiros, Vivian S.
Gasparino, Mateus V.
Chowdhary, Girish
Becker, Marcelo
contents Traditional RL-based locomotion controllers often suffer from low data efficiency, requiring extensive interaction to achieve robust performance. We present a model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) framework that improves sample efficiency for quadrupedal locomotion by appending synthetic data to the end of standard rollouts in PPO-based controllers, following the Dyna-Style paradigm. A predictive model, trained alongside the policy, generates short-horizon synthetic transitions that are gradually integrated using a scheduling strategy based on the policy update iterations. Through an ablation study, we identified a strong correlation between sample efficiency and rollout length, which guided the design of our experiments. We validated our approach in simulation on the Unitree Go1 robot and showed that replacing part of the simulated steps with synthetic ones not only mimics extended rollouts but also improves policy return and reduces variance. Finally, we demonstrate that this improvement transfers to the ability to track a wide range of locomotion commands using fewer simulated steps.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_06296
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Learning to Walk with Less: a Dyna-Style Approach to Quadrupedal Locomotion
Affonso, Francisco
Tommaselli, Felipe Andrade G.
Negri, Juliano
Medeiros, Vivian S.
Gasparino, Mateus V.
Chowdhary, Girish
Becker, Marcelo
Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
Traditional RL-based locomotion controllers often suffer from low data efficiency, requiring extensive interaction to achieve robust performance. We present a model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) framework that improves sample efficiency for quadrupedal locomotion by appending synthetic data to the end of standard rollouts in PPO-based controllers, following the Dyna-Style paradigm. A predictive model, trained alongside the policy, generates short-horizon synthetic transitions that are gradually integrated using a scheduling strategy based on the policy update iterations. Through an ablation study, we identified a strong correlation between sample efficiency and rollout length, which guided the design of our experiments. We validated our approach in simulation on the Unitree Go1 robot and showed that replacing part of the simulated steps with synthetic ones not only mimics extended rollouts but also improves policy return and reduces variance. Finally, we demonstrate that this improvement transfers to the ability to track a wide range of locomotion commands using fewer simulated steps.
title Learning to Walk with Less: a Dyna-Style Approach to Quadrupedal Locomotion
topic Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06296