Memory-Efficient Parallel Policy Learning for Collapse-Reactive Retreat via Hybrid Terrain Modeling

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Article Summary

At disaster sites and on unstable slopes, robot contact can collapse uninspected terrain, requiring retreat upon support loss. Massively parallel reinforcement learning of collapse-reactive retreat requires independent state--action experiences. However, on shared rigid-body collapsible terrain, one robot's collapse alters others' contacts without direct interaction. We call this indirect interference. Duplicating terrain objects prevents this but is memory-intensive, limiting parallel sampling. Our key insight is that policy learning does not necessarily require rigid-body collapse modeling, which is feasible but computationally expensive; collapse-induced contact responses can suffice. We therefore propose a memory-efficient parallel policy-learning framework for collapse-reactive retreat via hybrid terrain modeling. Hybrid terrain modeling combines rigid-body simulation of non-collapsible terrain with virtual contact forces for collapsible regions. A State-Multiplexed Contact Model shares terrain geometry and a contact-response law while maintaining environment-specific collapse states, enabling independent experiences without terrain objects for collapsible regions. The framework trains a proprioceptive policy for both normal locomotion and collapse-reactive retreat. It supports over 100 times as many parallel environments as fine-resolution rigid-block terrain within the same GPU memory limit. This scalability and improved sample efficiency enable over 50 times faster policy convergence with comparable retreat performance. Sim-to-sim and real-robot experiments demonstrate retreat under multiple collapse conditions. A supplementary video is available at: https://youtu.be/_RrhwjzEPE0

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