Learning to Climb: Constrained Contextual Bayesian Optimisation on a Multi-Modal Legged Robot

Controlling a legged robot to climb obstacles with different heights is challenging, but important for an autonomous robot to work in an unstructured environment. In this paper, we model this problem as a novel contextual constrained multi-armed bandit framework. We further propose a learning-based Constrained Contextual Bayesian Optimisation (CoCoBo) algorithm that can solve this class of problems efficiently. CoCoBo models both the reward function and constraints as Gaussian processes, incorporate continuous context space and action space into each Gaussian process, and find the next training samples through excursion search. The experimental results show that CoCoBo is more data-efficient and safe, compared to other related state-of-the-art optimisation methods, on both synthetic test functions and real-world experiments. Our real-world results—our robot could successfully learn to climb an obstacle higher than itself—reveal that our method has an enormous potential to allow self-adaptive robots to work in various terrains.