Reinforcement Learning Based Multi-Terrain Adaptive Whole-Body Control for a Quadruped Manipulator

Abstract:Legged robots equipped with manipulators offer promising capabilities for loco-manipulation tasks in unstructured environments. However, achieving task-consistent end-effector behavior during locomotion remains challenging due to terrain-induced disturbances and the strong coupling between locomotion and manipulation, particularly for small-scale quadruped platforms. A reinforcement-learning based whole-body control framework is proposed for quadruped loco-manipulation on complex terrain. The proposed framework combines a hybrid task representation with task-prioritized whole-body learning to coordinate locomotion and manipulation while preserving task-consistent end-effector behavior. A lightweight quadruped manipulator platform is further developed to validate the proposed framework on a small-scale quadruped system. Real-world experiments demonstrate successful deployment on complex terrains such as slopes up to 30 degrees, stairs, and deformable terrain. These results demonstrate the feasibility of deploying learned whole-body control policy for quadruped loco-manipulation in real-world environments and highlight the importance of task-consistent whole-body coordination for terrain-adaptive loco-manipulation.

Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2610.23548 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2610.23548v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.23548 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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