English

Rapid Locomotion via Reinforcement Learning

Robotics 2022-05-06 v1 Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning

Abstract

Agile maneuvers such as sprinting and high-speed turning in the wild are challenging for legged robots. We present an end-to-end learned controller that achieves record agility for the MIT Mini Cheetah, sustaining speeds up to 3.9 m/s. This system runs and turns fast on natural terrains like grass, ice, and gravel and responds robustly to disturbances. Our controller is a neural network trained in simulation via reinforcement learning and transferred to the real world. The two key components are (i) an adaptive curriculum on velocity commands and (ii) an online system identification strategy for sim-to-real transfer leveraged from prior work. Videos of the robot's behaviors are available at: https://agility.csail.mit.edu/

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2205.02824,
  title  = {Rapid Locomotion via Reinforcement Learning},
  author = {Gabriel B Margolis and Ge Yang and Kartik Paigwar and Tao Chen and Pulkit Agrawal},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2205.02824},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

Accepted for publication at Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) 2022

R2 v1 2026-06-24T11:08:35.053Z