Summarizing knowledge from animals and human beings inspires robotic
innovations. In this work, we propose a framework for driving legged robots act
like real animals with lifelike agility and strategy in complex environments.
Inspired by large pre-trained models witnessed with impressive performance in
language and image understanding, we introduce the power of advanced deep
generative models to produce motor control signals stimulating legged robots to
act like real animals. Unlike conventional controllers and end-to-end RL
methods that are task-specific, we propose to pre-train generative models over
animal motion datasets to preserve expressive knowledge of animal behavior. The
pre-trained model holds sufficient primitive-level knowledge yet is
environment-agnostic. It is then reused for a successive stage of learning to
align with the environments by traversing a number of challenging obstacles
that are rarely considered in previous approaches, including creeping through
narrow spaces, jumping over hurdles, freerunning over scattered blocks, etc.
Finally, a task-specific controller is trained to solve complex downstream
tasks by reusing the knowledge from previous stages. Enriching the knowledge
regarding each stage does not affect the usage of other levels of knowledge.
This flexible framework offers the possibility of continual knowledge
accumulation at different levels. We successfully apply the trained multi-level
controllers to the MAX robot, a quadrupedal robot developed in-house, to mimic
animals, traverse complex obstacles, and play in a designed challenging
multi-agent Chase Tag Game, where lifelike agility and strategy emerge on the
robots. The present research pushes the frontier of robot control with new
insights on reusing multi-level pre-trained knowledge and solving highly
complex downstream tasks in the real world.

通过使用动物和人类的知识来激发机器人创新，我们提出了一个框架，使四肢机器人能够在复杂环境中具备像真实动物一样的灵活性和策略。通过利用先进的深度生成模型产生模拟动物行为的运动控制信号，我们的方法通过预训练感知动物运动的生成模型，将原始知识保留并重复利用于环境适应性学习阶段，最终在复杂的下游任务中通过任务特定控制器解决任务，从而推动了机器人控制的前沿。