Quadruped robot traversing 3D complex environments

Yi Cheng*             Hang Liu*             Guoping Pan             Linqi Ye             Houde Liu             Bin Liang            


A novel quadruped robot controller for agile collision response in complex 3D environments.

Abstract

Traversing 3-D complex environments has always been a significant challenge for legged locomotion. Existing methods typically rely on external sensors such as vision and lidar to preemptively react to obstacles by acquiring environmental information. However, in scenarios like nighttime or dense forests, external sensors often fail to function properly, necessitating robots to rely on proprioceptive sensors to perceive diverse obstacles in the environment and respond promptly. This task is undeniably challenging. Our research finds that methods based on collision detection can enhance a robot's perception of environmental obstacles. In this work, we propose an end-to-end learning-based quadruped robot motion controller that relies solely on proprioceptive sensing. This controller can accurately detect, localize, and agilely respond to collisions in unknown and complex 3D environments, thereby improving the robot's traversability in complex environments. We demonstrate in both simulation and real-world experiments that our method enables quadruped robots to successfully traverse challenging obstacles in various complex environments.




Project Video

Framework

Your Image

Highland


 

 

Tunnel


 

Crack


 

Bush


 

Night Experiments


 

Failure Cases


 

Locomotion Performance on ICRA2024 QRC


 

BibTeX


@inproceedings{go2traverse,
title={Quadruped robot traversing 3D complex environments},
author={Yi Cheng, Hang Liu, Guoping Pan, Linqi Ye, Houde Liu, Bin Liang},
booktitle={arXiv preprint arXiv:2404.18225},
year={2024},
}

Acknowledgment