Agile Fall Recovery for Quadrotors with Bidirectional Thrust via Reinforcement Learning

Engineering notes

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Chinese explanation / 中文解读

中文解读待补充：本站会优先为 VLA、具身智能、人形机器人控制、机器人操作等高价值论文补充中文说明。

Original abstract

Autonomous fall recovery is a critical capability for quadrotors operating in real-world environments, where collisions or failures may leave the vehicle resting on the ground in an arbitrary attitude. This problem is challenging because recovery must be achieved under limited onboard sensing, in constrained free space, with ground contact, and in the presence of unknown disturbances. In this letter, we present an RL-based framework for autonomous fall recovery of a quadrotor from arbitrary ground attitudes to stable hover using only lightweight onboard sensors. To address severe partial observability and intermittent sensor invalidity, we train a recurrent policy within an asymmetric actor--critic architecture, leveraging an Incremental Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion (INDI) controller to track the policy output. Combined with high-fidelity simulations of motor response and optical flow, the overall training framework significantly reduces the sim-to-real gap. Simulation ablation studies validate the importance of the main design choices, while real-world experiments demonstrate zero-shot transfer and robust recovery under different initial attitudes, wind disturbances, and additional payloads. These results demonstrate that agile quadrotor fall recovery can be achieved without explicit state estimation using only limited and unreliable onboard sensing.

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• Official / arXiv page
• PDF from original source

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