用脚底红外传感器提前感知地形,让机器人稳过高低不平的路。
Learning Locomotion on Discrete Terrain via Minimal Proximity Sensing

- 在四足机器人脚底加低成本红外传感器,实现触前反馈。
- 实验表明该方法大幅提高越障稳定性,延迟更低功耗更小。
- 适合追求低功耗、高实时性的复杂环境机器人应用。
基于学习的控制已革新动态行走,但面对非结构化地形时,机器人对即将接触地面的信息感知不足仍是瓶颈。尽管激光雷达和深度相机等全局感知系统能提供环境信息,却常因延迟、遮挡及密集几何重建带来的高计算成本而受限。相比之下,本体感觉反馈仅在触地后才起作用,属于被动响应。本文在四足机器人脚底集成一组低成本、高频的红外近场传感器,获取触地前的“预接触”反馈,该方案对自遮挡鲁棒,且远低于传统视觉系统的计算开销。通过将这些局部信号融入强化学习框架,机器人可提前识别如缝隙或踏石等难处理的地形不连续性,这类问题常因遮挡或状态估计漂移导致传统感知系统失效。我们在仿真中验证了该稀疏近场感知的可靠性,并成功将其迁移至真实机器人。实验结果表明,这种局部近场传感显著提升了机器人在离散地形上的通行鲁棒性,为不可预测环境中提供了一种低功耗、低延迟的感知替代或补充方案。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Learning-based control has revolutionized dynamic locomotion, yet navigating unstructured terrain remains limited by a robot's incomplete awareness of imminent ground contact. While global perception systems such as LiDARs and depth cameras provide environmental context, they are frequently plagued by latencies, occlusions, and the high computational cost of dense geometric reconstruction. On the other hand, proprioceptive feedback is purely reactive, initiating corrections only after impact has occurred. This work explores embedding a minimal suite of low-cost, high-frequency infrared proximity sensors directly into the feet of a quadrupedal robot. These sensors provide "pre-contact" feedback that is robust to self-occlusions and significantly less computationally demanding than conventional vision-based pipelines. By integrating these localized signals into a reinforcement learning framework, we enable the robot to anticipate terrain discontinuities such as gaps and stepping stones that are problematic for traditional perception stacks due to occlusions or state estimation drift. We demonstrate that such sparse, near-field sensing can be reliably modeled in simulation and transferred to the real world with high fidelity. Experimental results show that local proximity sensing substantially improves traversal robustness over discrete terrain and offers a low-power, low-latency alternative or complement to complex global perception suites in unpredictable environments. For more information about results and methods, please see the project website: https://sites.google.com/view/foot-tof/home.
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