Legged robots, especially quadruped robots, are widely used in various environments due to their advantage in overcoming rough terrains. However, falling is inevitable. Therefore, the ability to overcome a falling state is an essential ability for legged robots. In this paper, we propose a method to fully recover a quadruped robot from a fall using a single-neural network model. The neural network model is trained in two steps in simulations using reinforcement learning, and then directly applied to AiDIN-VIII, a quadruped robot with 12 degrees of freedom. Experimental results using the proposed method show that the robot can successfully recover from a fall within 5 s in various postures, even when the robot is completely turned over. In addition, we can see that the robot successfully recovers from a fall caused by a disturbance.
Keywords: fall recovery; legged robot; reinforcement learning.