HomeTech NewsRobots that use their legs as if they were arms

Robots that use their legs as if they were arms

We have long used to think of quadruped robots as robotic versions of dogs. But there’s no reason why quadrupedal robots should be limited to using their four limbs as legs all the time. In fact, most other quadrupeds are versatile in this regard: four-legged animals frequently use their forelimbs to interact with the world around them for non-locomotor purposes.

Now, robotics at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of California at Berkeley are training robot dogs to use their legs for manipulation, not just locomotion, demonstrating skills including climbing walls, pressing buttons and even kicking a ball. soccer.

robot training

Training a robot to perform both locomotion and manipulation at the same time with the same limbs can be tricky using reinforcement learning techniques. It’s easy to get stuck in a local minimum while trying to optimize abilities that are very different and sometimes in opposition to each other. Therefore, the researchers divided the training into separate manipulation and locomotion policies, and trained them in simulation. Although this meant an additional step to unite those separate abilities in the real world to perform useful tasks.

To successfully perform a combined locomotion and manipulation task, a high-quality expert demonstration is required. The robot remembers what commands the human gave during the demonstration, and then creates a behavior tree it can follow, which breaks the tasks down into a series of connected locomotion and manipulation sub-tasks that it can perform in order. This also adds robustness to the system, because if the robot fails at any sub-task, it can “rewind” its way back through the behavior tree until it returns to a point of success, and then start over from there.

impressive skills

This particular robot (a Unitree Go1 with an Intel RealSense for perception) manages to balance against a wall to press a wheelchair access button that is almost three feet up, and then walks towards the open door, which is Pretty impressive. But more broadly, this is a useful step to help non-humanoid robots operate in human-optimized environments, which might be more important than meets the eye.

It is true that it is possible to modify our environments to be more robot friendly. We see it in places like hospitals (and some hotels) where robots can directly control elevators. This makes it much easier for the robots to move around, but sometimes it’s more practical (if not necessarily simpler) to build a robot that can push buttons instead of modifying the environment so that the robots can move around smoothly.

You have more information at robot-skills.github.io.

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