Adaptive Quadruped Balance Control for Dynamic Environments Using Maximum-Entropy Reinforcement Learning

Abstract

External disturbance poses the primary threat to robot balance in dynamic environments. This paper provides a learning-based control architecture for quadrupedal self-balancing, which is adaptable to multiple unpredictable scenes of external continuous disturbance. Different from conventional methods which construct analytical models which explicitly reason the balancing process, our work utilized reinforcement learning and artificial neural network to avoid incomprehensible mathematical modeling. The control policy is composed of a neural network and a Tanh Gaussian policy, which implicitly establishes the fuzzy mapping from proprioceptive signals to action commands. During the training process, the maximum-entropy method (soft actor-critic algorithm) is employed to endow the policy with powerful exploration and generalization ability. The trained policy is validated in both simulations and realistic experiments with a customized quadruped robot. The results demonstrate that the policy can be easily transferred to the real world without elaborate configurations. Moreover, although this policy is trained in merely one specific vibration condition, it demonstrates robustness under conditions that were never encountered during training.

Keywords

• quadruped robot
• multi-contact balance control
• reinforcement learning (RL)
• artificial neural networks (ANN)
• soft actor-critic (SAC)