Watch Your Step: Learning Semantically-Guided Locomotion in Cluttered Environment

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Liang, Denan, Zhu, Yuan, Liu, Ruimeng, Nguyen, Thien-Minh, Yuan, Shenghai, Xie, Lihua
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
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author Liang, Denan
Zhu, Yuan
Liu, Ruimeng
Nguyen, Thien-Minh
Yuan, Shenghai
Xie, Lihua
author_facet Liang, Denan
Zhu, Yuan
Liu, Ruimeng
Nguyen, Thien-Minh
Yuan, Shenghai
Xie, Lihua
contents Although legged robots demonstrate impressive mobility on rough terrain, using them safely in cluttered environments remains a challenge. A key issue is their inability to avoid stepping on low-lying objects, such as high-cost small devices or cables on flat ground. This limitation arises from a disconnection between high-level semantic understanding and low-level control, combined with errors in elevation maps during real-world operation. To address this, we introduce SemLoco, a Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework designed to avoid obstacles precisely in densely cluttered environments. SemLoco uses a two-stage RL approach that combines both soft and hard constraints. It performs pixel-wise foothold safety inference, which enables more accurate foot placement. Additionally, SemLoco integrates semantic map, allowing it to assign traversability costs instead of relying only on geometric data. SemLoco greatly reduces collisions and improves safety around sensitive objects, enabling reliable navigation in situations where traditional controllers would likely cause damage. Experimental results further show that SemLoco can be effectively applied to more complex, unstructured real-world environments. A demo video can be view at https://youtu.be/FSq-RSmIxOM.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_02657
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Watch Your Step: Learning Semantically-Guided Locomotion in Cluttered Environment
Liang, Denan
Zhu, Yuan
Liu, Ruimeng
Nguyen, Thien-Minh
Yuan, Shenghai
Xie, Lihua
Robotics
Although legged robots demonstrate impressive mobility on rough terrain, using them safely in cluttered environments remains a challenge. A key issue is their inability to avoid stepping on low-lying objects, such as high-cost small devices or cables on flat ground. This limitation arises from a disconnection between high-level semantic understanding and low-level control, combined with errors in elevation maps during real-world operation. To address this, we introduce SemLoco, a Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework designed to avoid obstacles precisely in densely cluttered environments. SemLoco uses a two-stage RL approach that combines both soft and hard constraints. It performs pixel-wise foothold safety inference, which enables more accurate foot placement. Additionally, SemLoco integrates semantic map, allowing it to assign traversability costs instead of relying only on geometric data. SemLoco greatly reduces collisions and improves safety around sensitive objects, enabling reliable navigation in situations where traditional controllers would likely cause damage. Experimental results further show that SemLoco can be effectively applied to more complex, unstructured real-world environments. A demo video can be view at https://youtu.be/FSq-RSmIxOM.
title Watch Your Step: Learning Semantically-Guided Locomotion in Cluttered Environment
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02657