Teacher-Guided Terrain-Aware Learning for Recovery of Quadruped Robots

Boyuan Deng*, Xu Yang, Yilin Mo, Nikolaos Tsagarakis
Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Tsinghua University

Abstract

We present an optimal posture formulation and posture evaluation machanism for robotic recovery on uneven terrain and a novel teacher-student reinforcement learning framework that enables a student policy to infer external terrain conditions using only proprioceptive sensing.

Framework and Fall Simulation


Diverse Terrains Depolyment

We show that our policy performs on the non-flat environments, also we provide the pt that anyone could be free to download it and deploy it on the real robot.

Flat
Foam_1
Foam_2

Roots environments

Stairs

Mass


Cross-Platform Validation

We show that our policy performs on the non-flat environments with Kyon robot which is Wheeled-Quadruped.

Box Grid
Pyramid Slope
Random Rough
Pyramid Stairs
Inverted Pyramid Stairs
Inverted Pyramid Stairs

Bibtex



    @ARTICLE{11495090,
      author={Deng, Boyuan and Yang, Xu and Mo, Yilin and Tsagarakis, Nikolaos},
      journal={IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters}, 
      title={Teacher-Guided Terrain-Aware Learning for Recovery of Quadruped Robots}, 
      year={2026},
      volume={11},
      number={6},
      pages={7564-7571},
      keywords={Quadrupedal robots;reinforcement learning;robot learning},
      doi={10.1109/LRA.2026.3688056}}

  

Acknowledgements:
We would like to thank all of guys from Humanoids and Human Centered Mechatronics (HHCM) for their discussions.

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