Humanoid robots are engineered to navigate terrains akin to those encountered by humans, which necessitates human-like locomotion and perceptual abilities. Currently, the most reliable controllers for humanoid motion rely exclusively on proprioception, a reliance that becomes both dangerous and unreliable when coping with rugged terrain. Although the integration of height maps into perception can enable proactive gait planning, robust utilization of this information remains a significant challenge, especially when exteroceptive perception is noisy. To surmount these challenges, we propose a solution based on a teacher-student distillation framework. In this paradigm, an oracle policy accesses noise-free data to establish an optimal reference policy, while the student policy not only imitates the teacher's actions but also simultaneously trains a world model with a variational information bottleneck for sensor denoising and state estimation. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our approach markedly enhances performance in scenarios characterized by unreliable terrain estimations. Moreover, we conducted rigorous testing in both challenging urban settings and off-road environments, the model successfully traverse 2 km of varied terrain without external intervention.

Humanoid robots are designed to navigate environments accessible to humans using their legs. However, classical research has primarily focused on controlled laboratory settings, resulting in a gap in developing controllers for navigating complex real-world terrains. This challenge mainly arises from the limitations and noise in sensor data, which hinder the robot's understanding of itself and the environment. In this study, we introduce World Model Reconstruction (WMR), an end-to-end learning-based approach for blind humanoid locomotion across challenging terrains. We propose training an estimator to explicitly reconstruct the world state and utilize it to enhance the locomotion policy. The locomotion policy takes inputs entirely from the reconstructed information. The policy and the estimator are trained jointly; however, the gradient between them is intentionally cut off. This ensures that the estimator focuses solely on world reconstruction, independent of the locomotion policy's updates. We evaluated our model on rough, deformable, and slippery surfaces in real-world scenarios, demonstrating robust adaptability and resistance to interference. The robot successfully completed a 3.2 km hike without any human assistance, mastering terrains covered with ice and snow.

Intelligent autonomous path planning is crucial to improve the exploration efficiency of planetary rovers. In this paper, we propose a learning-based method to quickly search for optimal paths in an elevation map, which is called NNPP. The NNPP model learns semantic information about start and goal locations, as well as map representations, from numerous pre-annotated optimal path demonstrations, and produces a probabilistic distribution over each pixel representing the likelihood of it belonging to an optimal path on the map. More specifically, the paper computes the traversal cost for each grid cell from the slope, roughness and elevation difference obtained from the DEM. Subsequently, the start and goal locations are encoded using a Gaussian distribution and different location encoding parameters are analyzed for their effect on model performance. After training, the NNPP model is able to perform path planning on novel maps. Experiments show that the guidance field generated by the NNPP model can significantly reduce the search time for optimal paths under the same hardware conditions, and the advantage of NNPP increases with the scale of the map.

Robot actuators directly affect the performance of robots, and robot drives directly affect the performance of robot actuators. With the development of robotics, robots have put higher requirements on robot drives, such as high stiffness, high accuracy, high loading, high efficiency, low backlash, compact size, and hollow structure. In order to meet the demand development of robot actuators, this research base proposes a new robot drive based on 3K-H-V topology using involute and cycloidal gear shapes, planetary cycloidal drive, from the perspective of drive topology and through the design idea of decoupling. In this study, the reduction ratio and the efficiency model of the 3K-H-V topology were analyzed, and a prototype planetary cycloidal actuator was designed. The feasibility of the drive is initially verified by experimentally concluding that the PCA has a hollow structure, compact size, and high torque density (69 kg/Nm).