Learning Agile Robotic Locomotion Skills by Imitating Animals

Understand

Reproducing the diverse and agile locomotion skills of animals has been a longstanding challenge in robotics.

• While manually-designed controllers have been able to emulate many complex behaviors, building such controllers involves a time-consuming and difficult development process, often requiring substantial expertise of the nuances of each skill.
• Reinforcement learning provides an appealing alternative for automating the manual effort involved in the development of controllers.
• However, designing learning objectives that elicit the desired behaviors from an agent can also require a great deal of skill-specific expertise.