Asimov Flex: base walk v0.3
Velocity-commanded walking policy for Asimov 1, trained in Isaac Lab with PPO. It is a base walk meant for later skills
to build on: forward, backward and sideways walking, turning while walking or on the spot, and standing still. The gait
was shaped with a reference cycle from an everyday human walk (CMU motion capture, retargeted with GMR) and a light AMP
style reward. It was then trained further for balance (pushes from every direction, steady forces, harder terrain) and
for robustness to differences between simulation and the robot (IMU tilt bias, motor strength and gain changes, extra
mass, command latency, joint friction, low-friction floors). A terrain height map was used by the critic during
training only; the policy itself uses only the robot's joint and body sensors.
Tested in simulation only (Isaac Lab, and MuJoCo with the public Asimov 1 model). It has not been run on the real robot.
policy.onnx is the exported policy for inference, producing joint-position actions.
agent.yaml records the actor-critic and AMP training settings, including the motion data configuration.
env.yaml records the simulation and locomotion task settings, including observations, actions, commands, and rewards.
- Training and evaluation code: menloresearch/isaac_asimov.
Inputs and outputs
- Control rate 50 Hz. Actions: 23 joint-position offsets,
target = default_pose + 0.25 * action, no filter.
- 80 inputs: the same 78 as the standard Asimov 1 walking policy, in the same order, followed by a 2-value gait clock.
- Gait clock:
(sin(2 pi phi), cos(2 pi phi)), with phi in [0, 1).
- Each control step while walking:
phi += 0.02 / period.
period is 0.8 s at command speeds up to 0.2 m/s and 0.7 s at 0.8 m/s and above, linear in between (planar command speed).
- When
|v_xy| + |w_z| <= 0.1 the robot stands: the clock outputs (0, 0) and phi stays at 0.
- Walking starts from
phi = 0 (both feet down); the right foot lifts first.
Results in simulation
Falls are the share of test episodes; pushes are velocity impulses, worst of 4 directions.
| Test |
Result |
| Falls on flat ground, all test commands |
0% |
| Velocity tracking error, 0.25 to 0.8 m/s |
11% or less |
| Standing push 0.8 m/s, Isaac Lab |
9% falls |
| Standing push 0.8 m/s from the front / back, MuJoCo |
0% / 9% falls |
| Walking push 0.8 m/s, MuJoCo |
9% falls |
| 6 cm stairs up / ±6 cm rough ground |
22% / 25% falls |
Known limits: very hard standing pushes (1.0 m/s) from the front often cause a fall; recovery from front pushes in
MuJoCo varies between nearby training checkpoints; a tilt bias of 5° or more in the IMU and command latency above about
40 ms make falls more likely.