四足机器人团队协作拖拽缆绳负载,实现复杂环境自主导航。
Decentralized Navigation of a Cable-Towed Load using Quadrupedal Robot Team via MARL
- 采用基于MARL的去中心化规划,每台机器人仅凭自身感知决策。
- 实测1-4台、仿真最多12台机器人协同成功,负载重量变化仍稳定运行。
- 适合需要灵活多机协作的现实场景,如救援或运输任务。
本研究解决多四足机器人团队在杂乱无结构环境中通过缆绳协同拖拽负载并避障的挑战。利用缆绳可在必要时保持松弛,使系统能穿越狭窄空间,但由此引发张紧与松弛状态交替的混合物理交互,计算复杂度随机器人数量呈指数增长。为此,我们提出一种可扩展的去中心化系统,能够动态协调可变数量的四足机器人,并管理负载拖拽任务中的混合物理交互。核心是基于多智能体强化学习(MARL)的规划器,采用集中训练、去中心化执行(CTDE)框架,使每个机器人仅基于局部观测自主决策。为加速学习并确保跨不同团队规模的有效协作,设计了定制化的训练课程。实验表明该框架具备灵活性与可扩展性:在真实环境中成功部署1至4台机器人,在仿真中支持多达12台机器人。去中心化规划器的推理时间不随团队规模变化。此外,系统对环境扰动具有鲁棒性,且适应不同负载重量。该工作推动了复杂真实环境中多足机器人协作的灵活性与效率。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
This work addresses the challenge of enabling a team of quadrupedal robots to collaboratively tow a cable-connected load through cluttered and unstructured environments while avoiding obstacles. Leveraging cables allows the multi-robot system to navigate narrow spaces by maintaining slack when necessary. However, this introduces hybrid physical interactions due to alternating taut and slack states, with computational complexity that scales exponentially as the number of agents increases. To tackle these challenges, we developed a scalable and decentralized system capable of dynamically coordinating a variable number of quadrupedal robots while managing the hybrid physical interactions inherent in the load-towing task. At the core of this system is a novel multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL)-based planner, designed for decentralized coordination. The MARL-based planner is trained using a centralized training with decentralized execution (CTDE) framework, enabling each robot to make decisions autonomously using only local (ego) observations. To accelerate learning and ensure effective collaboration across varying team sizes, we introduce a tailored training curriculum for MARL. Experimental results highlight the flexibility and scalability of the framework, demonstrating successful deployment with one to four robots in real-world scenarios and up to twelve robots in simulation. The decentralized planner maintains consistent inference times, regardless of the team size. Additionally, the proposed system demonstrates robustness to environment perturbations and adaptability to varying load weights. This work represents a step forward in achieving flexible and efficient multi-legged robotic collaboration in complex and real-world environments.
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