[Submitted on 23 Oct 2026]
Title:RAIWAY: A Large-Wheeled Bipedal Robot with Contact-Informed Blind Locomotion
View a PDF of the paper titled RAIWAY: A Large-Wheeled Bipedal Robot with Contact-Informed Blind Locomotion, by Kyungmin Nam and 5 other authors
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Abstract:We present RAIWAY, an in-house wheeled bipedal robot with 20-inch wheels, together with a contact-informed control approach for rolling locomotion across irregular and discontinuous terrain. Such locomotion is fundamentally contact-dominated, governed by local wheel--terrain interaction that is impractical to instrument directly and depends on more than terrain geometry alone. The proposed framework exploits the contact information available in simulation, distilling multi-contact events into a latent representation. At deployment, the controller infers this representation online from proprioception, requiring no contact sensing. In real-world experiments, the proposed system traverses diverse environments including steep slopes, gravel beds, studded surfaces, and rocky terrain, and demonstrates continuous ascent on the tested outdoor staircases with riser heights up to 15~cm. On our platform, the proposed controller further outperforms baselines without the contact-informed mechanism across challenging indoor and outdoor settings. The video can be found at this https URL.
Comments: 8 pages, 7 figures. Accepted to IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L)
Subjects:
Robotics (cs.RO)
Cite as: arXiv:2610.33172 [cs.RO]
(or arXiv:2610.33172v1 [cs.RO] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.33172
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
Submission history
From: Kyungmin Nam [view email] [v1] Fri, 23 Oct 2026 18:12:04 UTC (7,779 KB)
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