Real-Time Gait Adaptation for Quadrupeds using Model Predictive Control and Reinforcement Learning

TL;DR

This paper introduces a real-time gait adaptation framework for quadruped robots that combines Model Predictive Path Integral control with reinforcement learning to optimize gait and energy efficiency across different speeds.

Contribution

It presents a novel optimization framework integrating MPPI and Dreamer for adaptive gait control, extending to infinite-horizon planning for quadruped locomotion.

Findings

Up to 36.48% energy savings across target speeds

Maintains accurate velocity tracking

Enables adaptive, task-specific gaits

Abstract

Model-free reinforcement learning (RL) has enabled adaptable and agile quadruped locomotion; however, policies often converge to a single gait, leading to suboptimal performance. Traditionally, Model Predictive Control (MPC) has been extensively used to obtain task-specific optimal policies but lacks the ability to adapt to varying environments. To address these limitations, we propose an optimization framework for real-time gait adaptation in a continuous gait space, combining the Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) algorithm with a Dreamer module to produce adaptive and optimal policies for quadruped locomotion. At each time step, MPPI jointly optimizes the actions and gait variables using a learned Dreamer reward that promotes velocity tracking, energy efficiency, stability, and smooth transitions, while penalizing abrupt gait changes. A learned value function is incorporated as terminal reward, extending the formulation to an infinite-horizon planner. We evaluate our framework in simulation on the Unitree Go1, demonstrating an average reduction of up to 36.48 % in energy consumption across varying target speeds, while maintaining accurate tracking and adaptive, task-appropriate gaits.