Barkour: Benchmarking animal-level agility with quadruped robots

[curieuxjy]

https://ai.googleblog.com/2023/05/barkour-benchmarking-animal-level.html

In “Barkour: Benchmarking Animal-level Agility with Quadruped Robots”, we introduce the Barkour agility benchmark for quadruped robots, along with a Transformer-based generalist locomotion policy. Inspired by dog agility competitions, a legged robot must sequentially display a variety of skills, including moving in different directions, traversing uneven terrains, and jumping over obstacles within a limited timeframe to successfully complete the benchmark. By providing a diverse and challenging obstacle course, the Barkour benchmark encourages researchers to develop locomotion controllers that move fast in a controllable and versatile way. Furthermore, by tying the performance metric to real dog performance, we provide an intuitive metric to understand the robot performance with respect to their animal counterparts.