A Soft Actor-Critic Approach for a Blind Walking Hexapod Robot with Obstacle Avoidance

This paper investigates a path planning approach for the walking and obstacle avoidance of a blind hexapod robot in various field conditions. Hexapod robots often perform field tasks in unstructured environments, and their external sensors are affected by weather and light. This paper proposes the u...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Lei Wang, Ruiwen Li, Ziwei Huangfu, Yishan Feng, Yiyang Chen
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2023-10-01
Series:Actuators
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0825/12/10/393
Description
Summary:This paper investigates a path planning approach for the walking and obstacle avoidance of a blind hexapod robot in various field conditions. Hexapod robots often perform field tasks in unstructured environments, and their external sensors are affected by weather and light. This paper proposes the use of internal sensors to sense the terrain and a slightly modified soft actor-critic algorithm to train the motion strategy. A hexapod robot is capable of walking smoothly on rough ground only using internal sensors that are not affected by weather factors, and the soft actor-critic approach is superior for overcoming high-dimensional issues for multi-degree-freedom robot motion in unstructured environments.The experiments showed that the hexapod robot not only traversed rugged terrain at a fixed speed but also possessed obstacle avoidance capabilities.
ISSN:2076-0825