2025/03/03 by Harshita Mhaske, Aniket Mandhare, Mhaske, Harshita +5 · 1 citation
Engineering · #Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #Control and Dynamics of Mobile Robots #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Robotic Locomotion and Control #Robotics (cs.RO) #Soft Robotics and Applications
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2503.01102
openalex publication_date 2025/03/03 · openalex created_date 2025/10/12 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Designing robots capable of traversing uneven terrain and overcoming physical obstacles has been a longstanding challenge in the field of robotics. Walking robots show promise in this regard due to their agility, redundant DOFs and intermittent ground contact of locomoting appendages. However, the complexity of walking robots and their numerous DOFs make controlling them extremely difficult and computation heavy. Linear policies trained with reinforcement learning have been shown to perform adequately to enable quadrupedal walking, while being computationally light weight. The goal of this research is to study the effect of augmentation of observation space of a linear policy with newer state variables on performance of the policy. Since ground contact and reaction forces are the primary means of robot-environment interaction, they are essential state variables on which the linear policy must be informed. Experimental results show that augmenting the observation space with ground contact and reaction force data trains policies with better survivability, better stability against external disturbances and higher adaptability to untrained conditions.