Stair Climbing Stabilization of the HRP-4 Humanoid Robot using Whole-body Admittance Control
This work addresses stabilization for humanoid robots in industrial settings like Airbus manufacturing, but it is incremental as it builds on existing methods.
The paper tackled dynamic stair climbing with the HRP-4 humanoid robot by combining end-effector and CoM strategies in a whole-body admittance controller, demonstrating improved tracking performance in an experiment where the robot climbed stairs with 18.5 cm high steps.
We consider dynamic stair climbing with the HRP-4 humanoid robot as part of an Airbus manufacturing use-case demonstrator. We share experimental knowledge gathered so as to achieve this task, which HRP-4 had never been challenged to before. In particular, we extend walkingstabilization based on linear inverted pendulum tracking by quadratic programming-based wrench distribution and a whole-body admittance controller that applies both end-effector and CoM strategies. While existing stabilizers tend to use either one or the other, our experience suggests that the combination of these two approaches improves tracking performance. We demonstrate this solution in an on-site experiment where HRP-4 climbs an industrial staircase with 18.5 cm high steps, and release our walking controller as open source software.