2023-12-02-defazio23a.md

title	section	openreview	abstract	layout	series	publisher	issn	id	month	tex_title	firstpage	lastpage	page	order	cycles	bibtex_author	author	date	address	container-title	volume	genre	issued	pdf	extras
Seeing-Eye Quadruped Navigation with Force Responsive Locomotion Control	Poster	X7okQlJz9M	Seeing-eye robots are very useful tools for guiding visually impaired people, potentially producing a huge societal impact given the low availability and high cost of real guide dogs. Although a few seeing-eye robot systems have already been demonstrated, none considered external tugs from humans, which frequently occur in a real guide dog setting. In this paper, we simultaneously train a locomotion controller that is robust to external tugging forces via Reinforcement Learning (RL), and an external force estimator via supervised learning. The controller ensures stable walking, and the force estimator enables the robot to respond to the external forces from the human. These forces are used to guide the robot to the global goal, which is unknown to the robot, while the robot guides the human around nearby obstacles via a local planner. Experimental results in simulation and on hardware show that our controller is robust to external forces, and our seeing-eye system can accurately detect force direction. We demonstrate our full seeing-eye robot system on a real quadruped robot with a blindfolded human.	inproceedings	Proceedings of Machine Learning Research	PMLR	2640-3498	defazio23a	0	Seeing-Eye Quadruped Navigation with Force Responsive Locomotion Control	2184	2194	2184-2194	2184	false	DeFazio, David and Hirota, Eisuke and Zhang, Shiqi	given family David DeFazio given family Eisuke Hirota given family Shiqi Zhang	2023-12-02		Proceedings of The 7th Conference on Robot Learning	229	inproceedings	date-parts 2023 12 2	https://proceedings.mlr.press/v229/defazio23a/defazio23a.pdf