AI & ML
FCTS: Failure-Guided Curriculum Tree Search Over Generated Terrain for Legged Parkour
arXiv cs.RO0 views
arXiv:2610.22619v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quadruped parkour policies handle canonical obstacles well, but their training curricula often miss the irregular, compound geometry of industrial and disaster-response sites, where agile locomotion matters most. Such environments pose a hard generalization problem: even training directly on reconstructed geometry from the target site does not reliably yield policies that traverse it. Hand-designed curricula span only a few terrain families, and recent LLM-generated curricula offer little control over which policy weaknesses they target. We propose FCTS, a failure-conditioned terrain curriculum framework that uses localized traversal failures to automatically generate the terrains a policy should train on next. Each failure's location, termination mode, robot state, and surrounding terrain geometry condition this generation, and Monte Carlo Tree Search explores alternative curriculum trajectories under a fixed training budget. On terrains built from scanned real-world construction sites, FCTS raises success rate from 28.4% to 85.8% on a medium-difficulty course and from 14.9% to 44.7% on a hard course relative to the strongest parkour or LLM-curriculum baselines, and maintains higher progress on extreme terrains where full traversal is rare. Hardware experiments on a quadruped robot confirm that the learned FCTS policies transfer to the real world.
Source:https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22619PreviousEmbodiment-Classifier Guidance: Transferring Frozen VLAs Across Robot Dynamics without DemonstrationsNextTask Structure and Scalability in Multi-Robot Authoring
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