Robotics: Science and Systems XVIII

Human Motion Control of Quadrupedal Robots using Deep Reinforcement Learning

Sunwoo Kim, Maks Sorokin, Jehee Lee, Sehoon Ha

Abstract:

A motion-based control interface promises flexible robot operations in dangerous environments by combining user intuitions with the robot's motor capabilities. However, designing a motion interface for non-humanoid robots, such as quadrupeds or hexapods, is not straightforward because different dynamics and control strategies govern their movements. We propose a novel motion control system that allows a human user to operate various motor tasks seamlessly on a quadrupedal robot. We first retarget the captured human motion into the corresponding robot motion with proper semantics using supervised learning and post-processing techniques. Then we apply the motion imitation learning with curriculum learning to develop a control policy that can track the given retargeted reference. We further improve the performance of both motion retargeting and motion imitation by training a set of experts. As we demonstrate, a user can execute various motor tasks using our system, including standing, sitting, tilting, manipulating, walking, and turning, on simulated and real quadrupeds. We also conduct a set of studies to analyze the performance gain induced by each component.

Download:

Bibtex:

  
@INPROCEEDINGS{Kim-RSS-22, 
    AUTHOR    = {Sunwoo Kim AND Maks Sorokin AND Jehee Lee AND Sehoon Ha}, 
    TITLE     = {{Human Motion Control of Quadrupedal Robots using Deep Reinforcement Learning}}, 
    BOOKTITLE = {Proceedings of Robotics: Science and Systems}, 
    YEAR      = {2022}, 
    ADDRESS   = {New York City, NY, USA}, 
    MONTH     = {June}, 
    DOI       = {10.15607/RSS.2022.XVIII.021} 
}