Toward fast policy search for learning legged locomotion

Research output: Contribution to book/conference proceedings/anthology/reportConference contributionContributedpeer-review

Contributors

  • Marc Peter Deisenroth - , Technische Universität Darmstadt (Author)
  • Roberto Calandra - , Technische Universität Darmstadt (Author)
  • Andre Seyfarth - , Technische Universität Darmstadt (Author)
  • Jan Peters - , Technische Universität Darmstadt, Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (Author)

Abstract

Legged locomotion is one of the most versatile forms of mobility. However, despite the importance of legged locomotion and the large number of legged robotics studies, no biped or quadruped matches the agility and versatility of their biological counterparts to date. Approaches to designing controllers for legged locomotion systems are often based on either the assumption of perfectly known dynamics or mechanical designs that substantially reduce the dimensionality of the problem. The few existing approaches for learning controllers for legged systems either require exhaustive real-world data or they improve controllers only conservatively, leading to slow learning. We present a data-efficient approach to learning feedback controllers for legged locomotive systems, based on learned probabilistic forward models for generating walking policies. On a compass walker, we show that our approach allows for learning gait policies from very little data. Moreover, we analyze learned locomotion models of a biomechanically inspired biped. Our approach has the potential to scale to high-dimensional humanoid robots with little loss in efficiency.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication2012 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, IROS 2012
Pages1787-1792
Number of pages6
Publication statusPublished - 2012
Peer-reviewedYes
Externally publishedYes

Publication series

SeriesIEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems
ISSN2153-0858

Conference

Title25th IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Robotics and Intelligent Systems, IROS 2012
Duration7 - 12 October 2012
CityVilamoura, Algarve
CountryPortugal

External IDs

ORCID /0000-0001-9430-8433/work/158768047