Learning Arm-Assisted Fall Damage Reduction and Recovery for Legged Mobile Manipulators

Adaptive falling and recovery skills greatly extend the applicability of robot deployments. In the case of legged mobile manipulators, the robot arm could adaptively stop the fall and assist the recovery. Prior works on falling and recovery strategies for legged mobile manipulators usually rely on assumptions such as inelastic collisions and falling in defined directions to enable real-time computation. This paper presents a learning-based approach to reducing fall damage and recovery. An asymmetric actor-critic training structure is used to train a time-invariant policy with time-varying reward functions. In simulated experiments, the policy recovers from 98.9% of initial falling configurations. It reduces base contact impulse, peak joint internal forces, and base acceleration during the fall compared to the baseline methods. The trained control policy is deployed and extensively tested on the ALMA robot hardware. A video summarizing the proposed method and the hardware tests is available at https://youtu.be/avwg2HqGi8s