Learning robust perceptive locomotion for quadrupedal robots in the wild

🤖 Plain-English Summary

Legged robots that can operate autonomously in remote and hazardous environments will greatly increase opportunities for exploration into underexplored areas. The result is a legged locomotion controller with high robustness and speed.

🔑 Key Findings

• Exteroceptive perception is crucial for fast and energy-efficient locomotion: Perceiving the terrain before making contact with it enables planning and adaptation of the gait ahead of time to maintain speed and stability.
• However, using exteroceptive perception robustly for locomotion has remained a grand challenge in robotics.
• Snow, vegetation, and water visually appear as obstacles on which the robot cannot step or are missing altogether due to high reflectance.

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