Learning Active Spine Behaviors for Dynamic and Efficient Locomotion in Quadruped Robots In this work, we provide a simulation framework to perform systematic studies on the effects of spinal joint compliance and actuation on bounding performance of a 16DOF quadruped spined robot Stoch 2. Fast quadrupedal locomotion with active spine is an extremely hard problem, and involves a complex coordination between the various degrees of freedom. Therefore, past attempts at addressing this problem have not seen much success. DeepReinforcement Learning seems to be a promising approach, after its recent success in a variety of robot platforms, and the goal of this paper is to use this approach to realize the aforementioned behaviors. With this learning framework, the robot reached a bounding speed of 2.1m s with a maximum Froude number of 2. Simulation results also show that use of active spine, indeed, increased the stride length, improved the cost of transport, and also reduced the natural frequency to more realistic values.

Learning a Faster Locomotion Gait for a Quadruped Robot with ModelFree Deep Reinforcement Learning Quadruped robots have great agility, flexibility and stability, which enables them to walk through uneven terrain. Motion control of legged robots is always a difficult problem. Previous approaches mostly either use a predefined gait that results in clumsy and unnatural behavior, or use reinforcement learning approach to generate a gait strategy that needs longtime computation and elegant network design. In this paper, we present an effective approach that uses deep reinforcement learning with prior knowledge to optimize the gait of quadruped robot. By using a specific quadruped robot walking gait as a priori knowledge, this approach adopts the technique of distributed proximal policy optimization to optimize the search for better gait. The proposed approach does not require modelling of complex robots, and has good network convergence speed and learning effect. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed approach converges faster than other deep reinforcement learning methods without prior knowledge. Besides, our achieved gait has higher speed that is 50% faster than the trot gait without optimization.