Paper · arXiv 2409.10923
Agile Continuous Jumping in Discontinuous Terrains
Yuxiang Yang, Guanya Shi, Changyi Lin, Xiangyun Meng, Rosario Scalise, Mateo Guaman Castro, Wenhao Yu, Tingnan Zhang, Ding Zhao, Jie Tan, Byron Boots
A hierarchical learning and control framework enables a quadrupedal robot to perform agile, continuous, and terrain-adaptive jumping in complex environments using a combination of terrain perception, motion planning, and low-level control.
Abstract
We focus on agile, continuous, and terrain-adaptive jumping of quadrupedal robots in discontinuous terrains such as stairs and stepping stones. Unlike single-step jumping, continuous jumping requires accurately executing highly dynamic motions over long horizons, which is challenging for existing approaches. To accomplish this task, we design a hierarchical learning and control framework, which consists of a learned heightmap predictor for robust terrain perception, a reinforcement-learning-based centroidal-level motion policy for versatile and terrain-adaptive planning, and a low-level model-based leg controller for accurate motion tracking. In addition, we minimize the sim-to-real gap by accurately modeling the hardware characteristics. Our framework enables a Unitree Go1 robot to perform agile and continuous jumps on human-sized stairs and sparse stepping stones, for the first time to the best of our knowledge. In particular, the robot can cross two stair steps in each jump and completes a 3.5m long, 2.8m high, 14-step staircase in 4.5 seconds. Moreover, the same policy outperforms baselines in various other parkour tasks, such as jumping over single horizontal or vertical discontinuities. Experiment videos can be found at https://yxyang.github.io/jumping\_cod/.