Abstract
Model predictive control (MPC) has demonstrated effectiveness for humanoid bipedal locomotion; however, its
applicability in challenging environments, such as rough and slippery terrain, is limited by the difficulty
of modeling terrain interactions.
In contrast, reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved notable success in training robust locomotion policies
over diverse terrain, yet it lacks guarantees of constraint satisfaction and often requires substantial
reward shaping.
Recent efforts in combining MPC and RL have shown promise of taking the best of both worlds, but they are
primarily restricted to flat terrain or quadrupedal robots.
In this work, we propose an RL-augmented MPC framework tailored for bipedal locomotion over rough and
slippery terrain.
Our method parametrizes three key components of single- rigid-body-dynamics-based MPC: system dynamics,
swing leg controller, and gait frequency.
We validate our approach through bipedal robot simulations in NVIDIA IsaacLab across various terrains,
including stairs, stepping stones, and low- friction surfaces.
Experimental results demonstrate that our RL-augmented MPC framework produces significantly more adaptive
and robust behaviors compared to baseline MPC and RL.