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Learning a Centroidal Motion Planner for Legged Locomotion

Robotics 2020-11-06 v1

Abstract

Whole-body optimizers have been successful at automatically computing complex dynamic locomotion behaviors. However they are often limited to offline planning as they are computationally too expensive to replan with a high frequency. Simpler models are then typically used for online replanning. In this paper we present a method to generate whole body movements in real-time for locomotion tasks. Our approach consists in learning a centroidal neural network that predicts the desired centroidal motion given the current state of the robot and a desired contact plan. The network is trained using an existing whole body motion optimizer. Our approach enables to learn with few training samples dynamic motions that can be used in a complete whole-body control framework at high frequency, which is usually not attainable with typical full-body optimizers. We demonstrate our method to generate a rich set of walking and jumping motions on a real quadruped robot.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2011.02818,
  title  = {Learning a Centroidal Motion Planner for Legged Locomotion},
  author = {Julian Viereck and Ludovic Righetti},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2011.02818},
  year   = {2020}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T19:56:12.140Z