Skeleton Information-Driven Reinforcement Learning Framework for Robust and Natural Motion of Quadruped Robots

Legged robots have great potential in complex environments, but achieving robust and natural locomotion remains difficult due to challenges in generating smooth gaits and resisting disturbances. This article presents a novel reinforcement learning framework that integrates a skeleton-aware graph neural network (GNN), a single-stage teacher–student architecture, a system-response model, and a Wasserstein Adversarial Motion Priors (wAMP) module. The skeleton-aware GNN enriches observations by encoding key node information and link properties, providing structured body information and better spatial awareness on irregular terrains. Unlike conventional two-stage approaches, this method jointly trains teacher and student policies to accelerate learning and improve sim-to-real transfer using hybrid advantage estimation (HAE). The system-response model further enhances robustness by predicting future observations from historical states via contrastive learning, enabling the policy to anticipate terrain variations and external disturbances. Finally, wAMP provides a more stable adversarial imitation method for fitting expert datasets of both flat ground and stair locomotion. Experiments on quadruped robots demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves more natural gaits and stronger robustness than existing baselines.