Thursday, July 15, 2021

RMA: Rapid Motor Adaptation for Legged Robots

Very recommendable! Amazing stuff! This could be a significant advance!

"A reinforcement learning system enabled a four-legged robot to amble over unfamiliar, rapidly changing terrain. ...
Researchers at UC Berkeley, Facebook, and Carnegie Mellon developed Rapid Motor Adaptation (RMA). The system enabled a Unitree Robotics A1 to negotiate changing conditions and unexpected obstacles nearly in real time. The machine traversed muddy trails, bushy backcountry, and an oil-slicked plastic sheet without falling."

"... RMA is trained completely in simulation without using any domain knowledge like reference trajectories or predefined foot trajectory generators and is deployed on the A1 robot without any fine-tuning. We train RMA on a varied terrain generator using bioenergetics-inspired rewards and deploy it on a variety of difficult terrains including rocky, slippery, deformable surfaces in environments with grass, long vegetation, concrete, pebbles, stairs, sand, etc. RMA shows state-of-the-art performance across diverse real-world as well as simulation experiments. ..."

RMA: Rapid Motor Adaptation for Legged Robots
Research article appeared in RSS 2021

Credits to Andre Ng's weekly newsletter The Batch

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