Joint-Health-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Robust Robot Control Under Actuator Degradation

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Article Summary

Robots deployed in unstructured environments are susceptible to actuator-authority degradation, which reduces the effective control authority of individual actuators and can cause reinforcement learning policies trained under nominal dynamics to fail. Existing robustness approaches rely on discrete fault labels, broad domain randomization, or global latent variables, often without explicitly modeling continuous per-joint residual actuation capability. We propose a joint-health-aware reinforcement learning framework for robust robot control under simulated actuator degradation. Our framework encodes actuator condition in a continuous joint-health vector and models degradation as multiplicative attenuation of executed actions. A dedicated HealthNet estimator infers per-joint health from recent observations and actions, allowing the policy to redistribute control effort across healthy and degraded joints. We evaluate the method on Walker, Go2, Cassie, and Panda-based ManiSkill manipulation tasks under diverse degradation masks and severity levels. The method outperforms nominal and degradation-trained no-health baselines on the main evaluated metrics. Relative to the nominal baseline, task-level locomotion returns improve by up to 250.1\% and manipulation success rates by up to 15.2 percentage points; in the high-degradation Cassie group, return increases from 3.94 to 40.50 (+928.0\%). Ablations support the contribution of per-joint health estimation, action-degradation modeling, and health-conditioned control.

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