LLA-MPPI: Rapidly Adaptive Whole-body Control of Legged Robots with GPU-Accelerated Parallel Simulations

Abstract:Real-time whole-body controllers for legged robots typically plan through a fixed nominal model and degrade when the deployed dynamics change. Adaptive methods typically require a model structure that contact dynamics do not provide, or they need offline training for each anticipated condition. We present Look-back and Look-ahead Adaptive Model Predictive Path Integral control (LLA-MPPI). The method converts whole-body adaptation into selection over a bank of GPU-batched contact simulators with different physical or structural parameters. Windowed prediction errors select the simulator that best explains recent motion. A whole-body MPPI planner optimizes controls through the selected model. The framework requires no offline training, and its selected hypotheses are physically interpretable. Across four simulated tasks, it achieves 97.5% success while the strongest baseline reaches 74% and an oracle with the true model reaches 98.5%. Hardware validation on a Unitree Go2 shows the robot walking under a payload added mid-run, walking after one leg is disabled, and pushing a box to its goal while increasing its mass on the fly. Code, videos, and project details are available at: this https URL

Robotics (cs.RO); Systems and Control (eess.SY)

arXiv:2610.10465 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2610.10465v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.10465 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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