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Modern quadrupeds are skillful in traversing or even sprinting on uneven terrains in a remote uncontrolled environment. However, survival in the wild requires not only maneuverability, but also the ability to handle potential critical…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-10-28 Dikai Liu , Tianwei Zhang , Jianxiong Yin , Simon See

Motion mimicking, i.e., encouraging the control policy to mimic human motion, facilitates the learning of complex tasks via reinforcement learning (RL) for humanoid robots. Although standard RL frameworks demonstrate impressive locomotion…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Ludwig Chee-Ying Tay , I-Chia Chang , Yan Gu

Humans leverage the dynamics of the environment and their own bodies to accomplish challenging tasks such as grasping an object while walking past it or pushing off a wall to turn a corner. Such tasks often involve switching dynamics as the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-03-29 Saumya Saxena , Alex LaGrassa , Oliver Kroemer

Legged robots have shown promise in locomotion complex environments, but recovery from falls on challenging terrains remains a significant hurdle. This paper presents an Adaptive Fall Recovery (AFR) controller for quadrupedal robots on…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Yidan Lu , Yinzhao Dong , Ji Ma , Jiahui Zhang , Peng Lu

Reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated impressive performance in legged locomotion over various challenging environments. However, due to the sim-to-real gap and lack of explainability, unconstrained RL policies deployed in the real…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Haoyu Wang , Ruyi Zhou , Liang Ding , Tie Liu , Zhelin Zhang , Peng Xu , Haibo Gao , Zongquan Deng

Reinforcement learning (RL) for bipedal locomotion has recently demonstrated robust gaits over moderate terrains using only proprioceptive sensing. However, such blind controllers will fail in environments where robots must anticipate and…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-07-10 Helei Duan , Bikram Pandit , Mohitvishnu S. Gadde , Bart van Marum , Jeremy Dao , Chanho Kim , Alan Fern

Learning controllers that reproduce legged locomotion in nature has been a long-time goal in robotics and computer graphics. While yielding promising results, recent approaches are not yet flexible enough to be applicable to legged systems…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-07-26 Daniel Ordonez-Apraez , Antonio Agudo , Francesc Moreno-Noguer , Mario Martin

Legged robots are physically capable of traversing a wide range of challenging environments, but designing controllers that are sufficiently robust to handle this diversity has been a long-standing challenge in robotics. Reinforcement…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-10-12 Laura Smith , J. Chase Kew , Xue Bin Peng , Sehoon Ha , Jie Tan , Sergey Levine

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…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-08-08 Tingguang Li , Yizheng Zhang , Chong Zhang , Qingxu Zhu , Jiapeng sheng , Wanchao Chi , Cheng Zhou , Lei Han

Compact quadrupedal robots are proving increasingly suitable for deployment in real-world scenarios. Their smaller size fosters easy integration into human environments. Nevertheless, real-time locomotion on uneven terrains remains…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-02-20 Davide Plozza , Patricia Apostol , Paul Joseph , Simon Schläpfer , Michele Magno

In this paper, we describe an approach to achieve dynamic legged locomotion on physical robots which combines existing methods for control with reinforcement learning. Specifically, our goal is a control hierarchy in which highest-level…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-03-15 Kevin Green , Yesh Godse , Jeremy Dao , Ross L. Hatton , Alan Fern , Jonathan Hurst

Slip is a very common phenomena present in wheeled mobile robotic systems. It has undesirable consequences such as wasting energy and impeding system stability. To tackle the challenge of mobile robot trajectory tracking under slippery…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-02-01 Huidong Gao , Rui Zhou , Masayoshi Tomizuka , Zhuo Xu

Perceptive locomotion for legged robots requires anticipating and adapting to complex, dynamic environments. Model Predictive Control (MPC) serves as a strong baseline, providing interpretable motion planning with constraint enforcement,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Aditya Shirwatkar , Satyam Gupta , Shishir Kolathaya

Quadruped mobile manipulators offer strong potential for agile loco-manipulation but remain difficult to control and transfer reliably from simulation to reality. Reinforcement learning (RL) shows promise for whole-body control, yet most…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Yadong Liu , Jianwei Liu , He Liang , Dimitrios Kanoulas

This extended abstract provides a short introduction on our recently developed perception-based controller for quadrupedal locomotion. Compared to our previous approach based on Visual Foothold Adaptation (VFA) and Model Predictive Control…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-07-28 Shafeef Omar , Lorenzo Amatucci , Giulio Turrisi , Victor Barasuol , Claudio Semini

Developing robust locomotion controllers for bipedal robots with closed kinematic chains presents unique challenges, particularly since most reinforcement learning (RL) approaches simplify these parallel mechanisms into serial models during…

This paper presents an Impedance Primitive-augmented hierarchical reinforcement learning framework for efficient robotic manipulation in sequential contact tasks. We leverage this hierarchical structure to sequentially execute behavior…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-08-28 Amin Berjaoui Tahmaz , Ravi Prakash , Jens Kober

Quadruped robots are designed to achieve agile and robust locomotion by drawing inspiration from legged animals. However, most existing control methods for quadruped robots lack a key capacity observed in animals: the ability to exhibit…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Aoqian Zhang , Zixuan Zhuang , Chunzheng Wang , Shuzhi Sam Ge , Fan Shi , Cheng Xiang

Planning and execution of agile locomotion maneuvers have been a longstanding challenge in legged robotics. It requires to derive motion plans and local feedback policies in real-time to handle the nonholonomy of the kinetic momenta. To…

Despite the potential benefits of collaborative robots, effective manipulation tasks with quadruped robots remain difficult to realize. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical control system that can handle real-world collaborative…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-08-01 Mohsen Sombolestan , Quan Nguyen