最小限の近接センシングによる不連続地形での歩行学習
Learning Locomotion on Discrete Terrain via Minimal Proximity Sensing
四足ロボットの足に低コストの赤外線近接センサを埋め込み、接地前の情報を活用して不連続地形（隙間や飛び石）の歩行を強化学習で実現。シミュレーションから実機への転移も高精度で、従来の視覚システムに比べ低遅延・低消費電力で頑健性を向上させる。
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著者: Jiale Fan, Connor Flynn, Tianao Xu, Junzhe He, Andrei Cramariuc, Marco Hutter, Robert Baines
分類: cs.RO
原文アブストラクト
Learning-based control has revolutionized dynamic locomotion, yet navigating unstructured terrain remains limited by a robot's incomplete awareness of imminent ground contact. While global perception systems such as LiDARs and depth cameras provide environmental context, they are frequently plagued by latencies, occlusions, and the high computational cost of dense geometric reconstruction. On the other hand, proprioceptive feedback is purely reactive, initiating corrections only after impact has occurred. This work explores embedding a minimal suite of low-cost, high-frequency infrared proximity sensors directly into the feet of a quadrupedal robot. These sensors provide "pre-contact" feedback that is robust to self-occlusions and significantly less computationally demanding than conventional vision-based pipelines. By integrating these localized signals into a reinforcement learning framework, we enable the robot to anticipate terrain discontinuities such as gaps and stepping stones that are problematic for traditional perception stacks due to occlusions or state estimation drift. We demonstrate that such sparse, near-field sensing can be reliably modeled in simulation and transferred to the real world with high fidelity. Experimental results show that local proximity sensing substantially improves traversal robustness over discrete terrain and offers a low-power, low-latency alternative or complement to complex global perception suites in unpredictable environments. For more information about results and methods, please see the project website: https://sites.google.com/view/foot-tof/home.
