arXiv:2509. 06296v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Traditional on-policy reinforcement learning (RL) controllers for quadrupedal locomotion often suffer from low data efficiency, requiring millions of interactions with simulated environments to achieve stable control.
By Francisco Affonso, Felipe Tommaselli, Jo\~ao H. Al\'essio, Vivian S. Medeiros, Mateus V. Gasparino, Girish Chowdhary, Marcelo Becker
arXiv:2607. 18135v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Learning-based approaches to locomotion have risen in popularity in recent years, showing the capability for complex legged locomotion and whole-body control.
By Jordan Dowdy, Jean Chagas Vaz
arXiv:2607. 18365v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) for legged robots is advancing locomotion, demonstrating its ability to adapt to new and challenging terrain.
By Jordan Dowdy, Jean Chagas Vaz
arXiv:2607. 13579v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Enabling quadrupedal robots to traverse complex terrains-from rugged outdoor environments to urban landscapes-requires seamless integration of multiple motor skills, smooth transitions between gaits, and high-speed perceptive locomotion using only onboard sensors.
By Jun-Gill Kang, Jaehyun Park, Tae-Gyu Song, Joon-Ha Kim, Seungwoo Hong, Hae-Won Park
arXiv:2608. 12063v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Integrating locomotion and manipulation is essential for robot autonomy, but scaling standard Reinforcement Learning (RL) to complex tasks is severely bottlenecked by the slow, manual process of dense reward shaping.
By Martin Schuck, Maks Sorokin, Simone Manni, Duy Ta, Angela P. Schoellig, Marco Hutter, Simon Le Cleac'H, Jan Br\"udigam
arXiv:2608. 07328v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Hardware failures require legged robots to rapidly reorganize coordination and gait timing to maintain stability and mobility.
By Giovanbattista Gravina, Luca Rossini, Carlo Rizzardo, Arturo Laurenzi, Nikos Tsagarakis
Integrating locomotion and manipulation is essential for robot autonomy, but scaling standard Reinforcement Learning (RL) to complex tasks is severely bottlenecked by the slow, manual process of dense reward shaping. To bypass this limitation, we leverage Sample-based Model Predictive Control (SMPC) entirely in simulation as an automated, rapidly tunable expert to generate massive offline datasets.
arXiv:2607. 00442v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) for quadruped locomotion commonly depends on fixed, hand-crafted, and Markovian reward functions that limit both interpretability of learned policies and lack explicit control over gait behaviors.
By Merve Atasever, Cagan Bakirci, Alfredo Reina Corona, Keyan Azbijari, Jyotirmoy V. Deshmukh
TARC (Time‑Adaptive Robotic Control) is a reinforcement‑learning framework that lets a policy predict both a control action and how long it should be applied, thereby learning temporally extended actions. By optimizing task performance under constraints on the number of control switches, TARC can adapt its control rate online, using high‑frequency feedback only when necessary. Experiments on a high‑speed RC car, a Unitree Go1 quadruped, and a vision‑language action model show that TARC matches the performance of high‑frequency discrete‑time controllers while operating at less than half their control frequency.
By Arnav Sukhija, Lenart Treven, Jin Cheng, Florian D\"orfler, Stelian Coros, Andreas Krause
arXiv:2603. 13707v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Humanoid loco-manipulation requires coordinated task-space motion planning with stable loco-manipulation command tracking under complex robot-environment dynamics and long-horizon tasks.
By Zhaoyuan Gu, Yipu Chen, Zimeng Chai, Alfred Cueva, Thong Nguyen, Yifan Wu, Huishu Xue, Minji Kim, Isaac Legene, Fukang Liu, KyoungMok Kim, Ayan Barula, Yongxin Chen, Ye Zhao
arXiv:2608. 02069v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Developing deployable locomotion policies through conventional reinforcement learning often requires complex reward engineering and expensive training times.
By Martin Opat
arXiv:2506. 15700v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Control contraction metrics (CCMs)-defined by Riemannian metrics under which a closed-loop system is incrementally exponentially stable-offer a constructive framework for synthesizing contracting policies in nonlinear path-tracking problems.
By Minjae Cho, Hiroyasu Tsukamoto, Huy T. Tran