In plain words: A learned model predicts where a robot will end up from nearby terrain and its own motion history, letting a planner pick safe actions without hand-tuned safety rules. On a legged robot in rough simulated terrain, it raised navigation success 27% over strong baselines.
Abstract · Learned Perceptive Forward Dynamics Model for Safe and Platform-aware Robotic Navigation
Ensuring safe navigation in complex environments requires accurate real-time traversability assessment and understanding of environmental interactions relative to the robot`s capabilities. Traditional methods, which assume simplified dynamics, often require designing and tuning cost functions to safely guide paths or actions toward the goal. This process is tedious, environment-dependent, and not generalizable. To overcome these issues, we propose a novel learned perceptive Forward Dynamics Model (FDM) that predicts the robot`s future state conditioned on the surrounding geometry and history of proprioceptive measurements, proposing a more scalable, safer, and heuristic-free solution. The FDM is trained on multiple years of simulated navigation experience, including high-risk maneuvers, and real-world interactions to incorporate the full system dynamics beyond rigid body simulation. We integrate our perceptive FDM into a zero-shot Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) planning framework, leveraging the learned mapping between actions, future states, and failure probability. This allows for optimizing a simplified cost function, eliminating the need for extensive cost-tuning to ensure safety. On the legged robot ANYmal, the proposed perceptive FDM improves the position estimation by on average 41% over competitive baselines, which translates into a 27% higher navigation success rate in rough simulation environments. Moreover, we demonstrate effective sim-to-real transfer and showcase the benefit of training on synthetic and real data. Code and models are made publicly available under https://github.com/leggedrobotics/fdm.
Pascal Roth, Jonas Frey, Cesar Cadena, Marco Hutter
arXiv:2504.19322 · cs.RO · submitted Apr 27, 2025 · updated Apr 29, 2025
abstract · pdf · html · To be published in the proceedings of Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) 2025