Load-Aware Quadruped Navigation with Online Contact-based Geometry Estimation

Engineering notes

Engineering notes will be added by the Robot Papers editorial team.

Chinese explanation / 中文解读

中文解读待补充：本站会优先为 VLA、具身智能、人形机器人控制、机器人操作等高价值论文补充中文说明。

Original abstract

Navigating cluttered environments while carrying objects remains a challenging problem for quadruped robots. Compared with works that focused on load-aware locomotion adaptation to maintain gait stability, existing autonomous navigation systems generally ignore the influence of carried objects' geometries and use fixed footprint inflation, leading to overly conservative navigation. To fill this knowledge gap, we propose a two-phase load-aware navigation learning framework. In Phase 1, we train LOADNav, a load-aware navigation policy via reinforcement learning, enabling the robot to adapt its trajectory and clearance behavior according to the geometric size of the carried object. In Phase 2, we train CoGE, an online geometry predictor via imitation learning, which estimates unknown payload geometry from occasional contact events. We evaluate the framework in cluttered environments with loads of varying sizes and shapes. The results show that our navigation policy exhibits clear load-aware behaviors, and the online geometry predictor estimates object geometry from occasional contact events, refining its estimate and adapting the navigation behavior accordingly. Without requiring any prior knowledge of the payload, it narrows the gap to geometry-aware policies.

Links and sources

• Official / arXiv page
• PDF from original source

Comments