A Robust Quadruped Robot with Twisting Waist for Flexible Motions

The waist plays a crucial role in the agile movement of many animals in nature. It provides the torso with additional degrees of freedom and flexibility, inspiring researchers to incorporate this biological feature into robotic structures to enhance robot locomotion. This paper presents a cost-effective and low-complexity waist mechanism integrated into the structure of the open-source robot solo8, adding a new degree of freedom (DOF) to its torso. We refer to this novel robot as solo9. Additionally, we propose a full-body control method for the waist-equipped quadruped robot based on generative adversarial imitation learning (GAIL). During training, the discriminator is used as input for iterative optimization of the policy and dataset, enabling solo9 to achieve flexible steering maneuvers across various gaits. Extensive tests of solo9's steering capabilities, terrain adaptability, and robustness are conducted in both simulation and real-world scenarios, with detailed comparisons to solo8 and solo12, demonstrating the effectiveness of the control algorithm and the advantages of the waist mechanism.

HybridOcc: NeRF Enhanced Transformer-based Multi-Camera 3D Occupancy Prediction

Vision-based 3D semantic scene completion (SSC) describes autonomous driving scenes through 3D volume representations. However, the occlusion of invisible voxels by scene surfaces poses challenges to current SSC methods in hallucinating refined 3D geometry. This paper proposes HybridOcc, a hybrid 3D volume query proposal method generated by Transformer framework and NeRF representation and refined in a coarse-to-fine SSC prediction framework. HybridOcc aggregates contextual features through the Transformer paradigm based on hybrid query proposals while combining it with NeRF representation to obtain depth supervision. The Transformer branch contains multiple scales and uses spatial cross-attention for 2D to 3D transformation. The newly designed NeRF branch implicitly infers scene occupancy through volume rendering, including visible and invisible voxels, and explicitly captures scene depth rather than generating RGB color. Furthermore, we present an innovative occupancy-aware ray sampling method to orient the SSC task instead of focusing on the scene surface, further improving the overall performance. Extensive experiments on nuScenes and SemanticKITTI datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our HybridOcc on the SSC task.