Scaling Rough Terrain Locomotion with Automatic Curriculum Reinforcement Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Li, Ziming, Li, Chenhao, Hutter, Marco
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Li, Ziming
Li, Chenhao
Hutter, Marco
author_facet Li, Ziming
Li, Chenhao
Hutter, Marco
contents Curriculum learning has demonstrated substantial effectiveness in robot learning. However, it still faces limitations when scaling to complex, wide-ranging task spaces. Such task spaces often lack a well-defined difficulty structure, making the difficulty ordering required by previous methods challenging to define. We propose a Learning Progress-based Automatic Curriculum Reinforcement Learning (LP-ACRL) framework, which estimates the agent's learning progress online and adaptively adjusts the task-sampling distribution, thereby enabling automatic curriculum generation without prior knowledge of the difficulty distribution over the task space. Policies trained with LP-ACRL enable the ANYmal D quadruped to achieve and maintain stable, high-speed locomotion at 2.5 m/s linear velocity and 3.0 rad/s angular velocity across diverse terrains, including stairs, slopes, gravel, and low-friction flat surfaces--whereas previous methods have generally been limited to high speeds on flat terrain or low speeds on complex terrain. Experimental results demonstrate that LP-ACRL exhibits strong scalability and real-world applicability, providing a robust baseline for future research on curriculum generation in complex, wide-ranging robotic learning task spaces.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_17428
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Scaling Rough Terrain Locomotion with Automatic Curriculum Reinforcement Learning
Li, Ziming
Li, Chenhao
Hutter, Marco
Robotics
Curriculum learning has demonstrated substantial effectiveness in robot learning. However, it still faces limitations when scaling to complex, wide-ranging task spaces. Such task spaces often lack a well-defined difficulty structure, making the difficulty ordering required by previous methods challenging to define. We propose a Learning Progress-based Automatic Curriculum Reinforcement Learning (LP-ACRL) framework, which estimates the agent's learning progress online and adaptively adjusts the task-sampling distribution, thereby enabling automatic curriculum generation without prior knowledge of the difficulty distribution over the task space. Policies trained with LP-ACRL enable the ANYmal D quadruped to achieve and maintain stable, high-speed locomotion at 2.5 m/s linear velocity and 3.0 rad/s angular velocity across diverse terrains, including stairs, slopes, gravel, and low-friction flat surfaces--whereas previous methods have generally been limited to high speeds on flat terrain or low speeds on complex terrain. Experimental results demonstrate that LP-ACRL exhibits strong scalability and real-world applicability, providing a robust baseline for future research on curriculum generation in complex, wide-ranging robotic learning task spaces.
title Scaling Rough Terrain Locomotion with Automatic Curriculum Reinforcement Learning
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.17428