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Register a new userReview of Quadruped Robots for Dynamic Locomotion
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Added by
Qiayuan Liao
Publication date
2020
fields
Informatics Engineering
and research's language is
English
Authors
Qiayuan Liao
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This review introduces quadruped robots: MITCheetah, HyQ, ANYmal, BigDog, and their mechanical structure, actuation, and control.
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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 learn quadruped locomotion from scratch using simple reward signals. In addition, users can provide an open loop reference to guide the learning process when more control over the learned gait is needed. The control policies are learned in a physics simulator and then deployed on real robots. In robotics, policies trained in simulation often do not transfer to the real world. We narrow this reality gap by improving the physics simulator and learning robust policies. We improve the simulation using system identification, developing an accurate actuator model and simulating latency. We learn robust controllers by randomizing the physical environments, adding perturbations and designing a compact observation space. We evaluate our system on two agile locomotion gaits: trotting and galloping. After learning in simulation, a quadruped robot can successfully perform both gaits in the real world.
Whole-body control (WBC) is a generic task-oriented control method for feedback control of loco-manipulation behaviors in humanoid robots. The combination of WBC and model-based walking controllers has been widely utilized in various humanoid robots. However, to date, the WBC method has not been employed for unsupported passive-ankle dynamic locomotion. As such, in this paper, we devise a new WBC, dubbed whole-body locomotion controller (WBLC), that can achieve experimental dynamic walking on unsupported passive-ankle biped robots. A key aspect of WBLC is the relaxation of contact constraints such that the control commands produce reduced jerk when switching foot contacts. To achieve robust dynamic locomotion, we conduct an in-depth analysis of uncertainty for our dynamic walking algorithm called time-to-velocity-reversal (TVR) planner. The uncertainty study is fundamental as it allows us to improve the control algorithms and mechanical structure of our robot to fulfill the tolerated uncertainty. In addition, we conduct extensive experimentation for: 1) unsupported dynamic balancing (i.e. in-place stepping) with a six degree-of-freedom (DoF) biped, Mercury; 2) unsupported directional walking with Mercury; 3) walking over an irregular and slippery terrain with Mercury; and 4) in-place walking with our newly designed ten-DoF viscoelastic liquid-cooled biped, DRACO. Overall, the main contributions of this work are on: a) achieving various modalities of unsupported dynamic locomotion of passive-ankle bipeds using a WBLC controller and a TVR planner, b) conducting an uncertainty analysis to improve the mechanical structure and the controllers of Mercury, and c) devising a whole-body control strategy that reduces movement jerk during walking.
We present a framework for dynamic quadrupedal locomotion over challenging terrain, where the choice of appropriate footholds is crucial for the success of the behaviour. We build a model of the environment on-line and on-board using an efficient occupancy grid representation. We use Any-time-Repairing A* (ARA*) to search over a tree of possible actions, choose a rough body path and select the locally-best footholds accordingly. We run a n-step lookahead optimization of the body trajectory using a dynamic stability metric, the Zero Moment Point (ZMP), that generates natural dynamic whole-body motions. A combination of floating-base inverse dynamics and virtual model control accurately executes the desired motions on an actively compliant system. Experimental trials show that this framework allows us to traverse terrains at nearly 6 times the speed of our previous work, evaluated over the same set of trials.
Legged robots have been shown to be effective in navigating unstructured environments. Although there has been much success in learning locomotion policies for quadruped robots, there is little research on how to incorporate human knowledge to facilitate this learning process. In this paper, we demonstrate that human knowledge in the form of LTL formulas can be applied to quadruped locomotion learning within a Reward Machine (RM) framework. Experimental results in simulation show that our RM-based approach enables easily defining diverse locomotion styles, and efficiently learning locomotion policies of the defined styles.
Animals have remarkable abilities to adapt locomotion to different terrains and tasks. However, robots trained by means of reinforcement learning are typically able to solve only a single task and a transferred policy is usually inferior to that trained from scratch. In this work, we demonstrate that meta-reinforcement learning can be used to successfully train a robot capable to solve a wide range of locomotion tasks. The performance of the meta-trained robot is similar to that of a robot that is trained on a single task.
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