Shield-Loco: Shielding Locomotion Policies with Predictive Safety Filtering

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Article Summary

Reinforcement learning (RL) policies enable dynamic legged locomotion but lack mechanisms to avoid violations of safety constraints that are absent during training. Large-scale offline safe learning is impractical for covering all edge cases. Existing safety frameworks either rely on reduced-order models that cannot reason about whole-body behaviors or require conservative recovery controllers that degrade task performance. We propose a predictive safety filter that post-hoc filters the nominal contact locations fed to the RL policy. When a collision is predicted, a sampling-based optimizer asynchronously searches for safer contact sequences using a full-physics model, while a learned value function bootstraps long-horizon returns. Our three algorithmic components (geometric projection of sampled contacts, momentum-augmented updates, and replica-exchange) make the optimization tractable in a discontinuous contact landscape. We validate the filter on a quadruped robot in dense, cluttered environments, both in simulation and in the real world, showing substantial reductions in safety violations with minimal deviation from the nominal input.

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