Soft Soil Gait Planning and Control for Biped Robot using Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient Approach

Abstract: Biped robots have plenty of benefits over wheeled, quadruped, or hexapod robots due to their ability to behave like human beings in tough and non-flat environments. Deformable terrain is another challenge for biped robots as it has to deal with sinkage and maintain stability without falling. In this study, we are proposing a Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) approach for motion control of a flat-foot biped robot walking on deformable terrain. We have considered a 7-link biped robot for our proposed approach. For soft soil terrain modeling, we have considered triangular Mesh to describe its geometry, where mesh parameters determine the softness of soil. All simulations have been performed on PyChrono, which can handle soft soil environments.