Paper ID: 2308.03273

Learning Terrain-Adaptive Locomotion with Agile Behaviors by Imitating Animals

Tingguang Li, Yizheng Zhang, Chong Zhang, Qingxu Zhu, Jiapeng sheng, Wanchao Chi, Cheng Zhou, Lei Han

In this paper, we present a general learning framework for controlling a quadruped robot that can mimic the behavior of real animals and traverse challenging terrains. Our method consists of two steps: an imitation learning step to learn from motions of real animals, and a terrain adaptation step to enable generalization to unseen terrains. We capture motions from a Labrador on various terrains to facilitate terrain adaptive locomotion. Our experiments demonstrate that our policy can traverse various terrains and produce a natural-looking behavior. We deployed our method on the real quadruped robot Max via zero-shot simulation-to-reality transfer, achieving a speed of 1.1 m/s on stairs climbing.

Submitted: Aug 7, 2023