Passive-wheel quadrupedal robots offer energy-efficient locomotion through leg-driven propulsion and momentum-driven gliding. However, navigation requires coordinating steering with intermittent propulsion and adapting push-glide timing to task demands. Velocity-tracking objectives may suppress the speed variations inherent in skating, discouraging efficient gliding. To address these challenges, we propose SkateNav, a unified skating-navigation framework based on reinforcement learning. A time-budgeted goal-reaching objective allows the policy to jointly learn steering, propulsion, and their temporal allocation. An adaptive skating cycle structures gliding, pushing, and recovery, while frequency modulation at every control step adjusts phase durations to navigation demands. Simulation experiments demonstrate higher average success rates and lower cost of transport than the evaluated planner-controller baselines, with ablations confirming the contributions of cycle structure and frequency adaptation. Real-world experiments demonstrate zero-shot transfer from simulation to a passive-wheel Mini Cheetah across cluttered indoor spaces, slopes, and paved outdoor surfaces. Supplementary videos are available on the project page: https://ktw1404.github.io/SkateNav/

翻译：暂无翻译