PPL: Point Cloud Supervised Proprioceptive Locomotion Reinforcement Learning for Legged Robots in Crawl Spaces

--Legged locomotion in constrained spaces (called crawl spaces) is challenging. In crawl spaces, current proprioceptive locomotion learning methods are difficult to achieve traverse because only ground features are inferred. In this study, a point cloud supervis ed RL framework for proprioceptive locomotion in crawl spaces is proposed . A state estimation network is designed to estimate the robot's collision states as well as ground and spatial features for locomotion . A point cloud feature extraction method is proposed to supervise the state estimation network . The method uses representation of the point cloud in polar coordinate frame and MLP s for efficient feature extracti on. Experiments demonstrate that, compared with existing methods, our method exhibits faster iteration time in the training and more agile locomotion in crawl spaces. This study enhances the ability of leg ged robots to traverse constrained spaces w ithout requiring exteroceptive sensors. N recent years, legged robots have demonstrated remarkable terrain traversal capabilities, exhibiting significant application value.