DeepQ Stepper: A framework for reactive dynamic walking on uneven terrain

Abstract

Reactive stepping and push recovery for biped robots is often restricted to flat terrains because of the difficulty in computing capture regions for nonlinear dynamic models. In this paper, we address this limitation by proposing a novel 3D reactive stepper, the DeepQ stepper, that can approximately learn the 3D capture regions of both simplified and full robot dynamic models using reinforcement learning, which can then be used to find optimal steps. The stepper can take into account the entire dynamics of the robot, ignored in most reactive steppers, leading to a significant improvement in performance. The DeepQ stepper can handle nonconvex terrain with obstacles, walk on restricted surfaces like stepping stones while tracking different velocities, and recover from external disturbances for a constant low computational cost.