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Climbing, crouching, bridging gaps, and walking up stairs are just a few of the advantages that quadruped robots have over wheeled robots, making them more suitable for navigating rough and unstructured terrain. However, executing such…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-09-16 Guillaume Gagné-Labelle , Vassil Atanassov , Ioannis Havoutis

Numerous locomotion controllers have been designed based on Reinforcement Learning (RL) to facilitate blind quadrupedal locomotion traversing challenging terrains. Nevertheless, locomotion control is still a challenging task for quadruped…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-07-08 Zhiyuan Xiao , Xinyu Zhang , Xiang Zhou , Qingrui Zhang

Model-free reinforcement learning has recently been shown to be effective at learning navigation policies from complex image input. However, these algorithms tend to require large amounts of interaction with the environment, which can be…

Robotics · Computer Science 2018-07-17 Jake Bruce , Niko Sünderhauf , Piotr Mirowski , Raia Hadsell , Michael Milford

Legged locomotion in unstructured environments demands not only high-performance control policies but also formal guarantees to ensure robustness under perturbations. Control methods often require carefully designed reference trajectories,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Vrushabh Zinage , Narek Harutyunyan , Eric Verheyden , Fred Y. Hadaegh , Soon-Jo Chung

This paper presents a novel approach that combines the advantages of both model-based and learning-based frameworks to achieve robust locomotion. The residual modules are integrated with each corresponding part of the model-based framework,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-07-25 Min-Gyu Kim , Dongyun Kang , Hajun Kim , Hae-Won Park

Quadruped animals are capable of exhibiting a diverse range of locomotion gaits. While progress has been made in demonstrating such gaits on robots, current methods rely on motion priors, dynamics models, or other forms of extensive manual…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-02-23 David DeFazio , Yohei Hayamizu , Shiqi Zhang

During initial iterations of training in most Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms, agents perform a significant number of random exploratory steps. In the real world, this can limit the practicality of these algorithms as it can lead to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-17 Ashish Kumar Jayant , Shalabh Bhatnagar

This paper investigates a hybrid solution which combines deep reinforcement learning (RL) and classical trajectory planning for the following in front application. Here, an autonomous robot aims to stay ahead of a person as the person…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-11-09 Payam Nikdel , Richard Vaughan , Mo Chen

Modern learning-based locomotion controllers typically rely on fully trainable deep neural networks with a large number of parameters. This paper studies a different design point for end-to-end control: whether effective quadruped…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Zhuochen Liu , Rahul Jain , Quan Nguyen

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

Policy gradient (PG) algorithms have been widely used in reinforcement learning (RL). However, PG algorithms rely on exploiting the value function being learned with the first-order update locally, which results in limited sample…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-06 Hao Sun , Ziping Xu , Yuhang Song , Meng Fang , Jiechao Xiong , Bo Dai , Bolei Zhou

Residual Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a popular approach for adapting pretrained policies by learning a lightweight residual policy that provides corrective actions. While Residual RL is more sample-efficient than finetuning the entire…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Lakshita Dodeja , Karl Schmeckpeper , Shivam Vats , Thomas Weng , Mingxi Jia , George Konidaris , Stefanie Tellex

Optimal Control for legged robots has gone through a paradigm shift from position-based to torque-based control, owing to the latter's compliant and robust nature. In parallel to this shift, the community has also turned to Deep…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-09-04 Shivam Sood , Ge Sun , Peizhuo Li , Guillaume Sartoretti

This article presents Platform Adaptive Locomotion (PAL), a unified control method for quadrupedal robots with different morphologies and dynamics. We leverage deep reinforcement learning to train a single locomotion policy on procedurally…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-07-11 David Rytz , Suyoung Choi , Wanming Yu , Wolfgang Merkt , Jemin Hwangbo , Ioannis Havoutis

Pretrained imitation policies have become a strong foundation for robot manipulation, but they often require online improvement to overcome execution errors, limited dataset coverage, and deployment mismatch. A central question is therefore…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Dongjie Yu , Kun Lei , Zhennan Jiang , Jia Pan , Huazhe Xu

The goal of policy-based reinforcement learning (RL) is to search the maximal point of its objective. However, due to the inherent non-concavity of its objective, convergence to a first-order stationary point (FOSP) can not guarantee the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-04 Long Yang , Qian Zheng , Gang Pan

Designing agile locomotion for quadruped robots often requires extensive expertise and tedious manual tuning. In this paper, we present a system to automate this process by leveraging deep reinforcement learning techniques. Our system can…

Policy gradient methods can solve complex tasks but often fail when the dimensionality of the action-space or objective multiplicity grow very large. This occurs, in part, because the variance on score-based gradient estimators scales…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-24 Thomas Spooner , Nelson Vadori , Sumitra Ganesh

Reinforcement learning (RL) in continuous state-action spaces remains challenging in scientific computing due to poor sample efficiency and lack of pathwise physical consistency. We introduce Differential Reinforcement Learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Minh Nguyen , Chandrajit Bajaj

Reinforcement learning continuously optimizes decision-making based on real-time feedback reward signals through continuous interaction with the environment, demonstrating strong adaptive and self-learning capabilities. In recent years, it…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-08-15 Zixiang Wang , Hao Yan , Yining Wang , Zhengjia Xu , Zhuoyue Wang , Zhizhong Wu