Look Forward to Walk Backward: Efficient Terrain Memory for Backward Locomotion with Forward Vision

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Luo, Shixin, Li, Songbo, Hao, Yuan, Wang, Yaqi, Zheng, Jun, Wu, Jun, Zhu, Qiuguo
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Luo, Shixin
Li, Songbo
Hao, Yuan
Wang, Yaqi
Zheng, Jun
Wu, Jun
Zhu, Qiuguo
author_facet Luo, Shixin
Li, Songbo
Hao, Yuan
Wang, Yaqi
Zheng, Jun
Wu, Jun
Zhu, Qiuguo
contents Legged robots with egocentric forward-facing depth cameras can couple exteroception and proprioception to achieve robust forward agility on complex terrain. When these robots walk backward, the forward-only field of view provides no preview. Purely proprioceptive controllers can remain stable on moderate ground when moving backward but cannot fully exploit the robot's capabilities on complex terrain and must collide with obstacles. We present Look Forward to Walk Backward (LF2WB), an efficient terrain-memory locomotion framework that uses forward egocentric depth and proprioception to write a compact associative memory during forward motion and to retrieve it for collision-free backward locomotion without rearward vision. The memory backbone employs a delta-rule selective update that softly removes then writes the memory state along the active subspace. Training uses hardware-efficient parallel computation, and deployment runs recurrent, constant-time per-step inference with a constant-size state, making the approach suitable for onboard processors on low-cost robots. Experiments in both simulations and real-world scenarios demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, improving backward agility across complex terrains under limited sensing.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_03138
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Look Forward to Walk Backward: Efficient Terrain Memory for Backward Locomotion with Forward Vision
Luo, Shixin
Li, Songbo
Hao, Yuan
Wang, Yaqi
Zheng, Jun
Wu, Jun
Zhu, Qiuguo
Robotics
Legged robots with egocentric forward-facing depth cameras can couple exteroception and proprioception to achieve robust forward agility on complex terrain. When these robots walk backward, the forward-only field of view provides no preview. Purely proprioceptive controllers can remain stable on moderate ground when moving backward but cannot fully exploit the robot's capabilities on complex terrain and must collide with obstacles. We present Look Forward to Walk Backward (LF2WB), an efficient terrain-memory locomotion framework that uses forward egocentric depth and proprioception to write a compact associative memory during forward motion and to retrieve it for collision-free backward locomotion without rearward vision. The memory backbone employs a delta-rule selective update that softly removes then writes the memory state along the active subspace. Training uses hardware-efficient parallel computation, and deployment runs recurrent, constant-time per-step inference with a constant-size state, making the approach suitable for onboard processors on low-cost robots. Experiments in both simulations and real-world scenarios demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, improving backward agility across complex terrains under limited sensing.
title Look Forward to Walk Backward: Efficient Terrain Memory for Backward Locomotion with Forward Vision
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.03138