Around the World: Unified Learned Locomotion on a 270 g Continuous-Rotation Quadruped


(Under Review)

Videos

Continuous Walking

Multiple Throws

Different Floors

Abstract

Closed-loop learned locomotion has matured on commercial quadrupeds but remains uncommon at the sub-kilogram scale. We present a single learned policy that handles throw recovery, multi-posture walking, and hardware variation on the MiNI-Q, a 270 g quadruped whose belt-driven legs rotate continuously through 360°. The same trained network switches between posture targets on the joint torus T8, walks upright and inverted under a gravity-conditioned reference, and recovers from arbitrary spawn orientations, all without state machines or phase switching. We identify the Dynamixel XL330 actuators across their operating regimes, cross-validate the trained policy in MuJoCo, Isaac Gym, and Isaac Lab, and deploy a compact sub-100k-parameter network onboard at 50 Hz on a dual-microcontroller stack. We further train under foot-shape domain randomization and verify on hardware that the same policy walks across multiple printed lower-link variants swapped at test time. The result is a single learned controller for throw recovery, multi-posture walking, and hardware variation, all on the same miniature robot.

Simulation

IsaacGym

IsaacLab

MuJoCo

Locomotion With Different Gaits

ANYmal

Crouch

Q8bot

Inverted ANYmal

Inverted Crouch

Inverted Q8bot

Throws

Upright Pitch

Upright Roll

Inverted Pitch

Inverted Roll

Disturbance

Flip

Nudge

Breakdance

Foot Iterations

Photo of all feet variants

Photo of all the Feet

Changing Foot (less than 1 minute!)

Walking with Different Feet

Additional Results

Different MiNIQ

Attitude Control (Roll Pitch)

BibTeX

Coming soon once accepted! 😝