Perceptive Variable-Timing Footstep Planning for Humanoid Locomotion on Disconnected Footholds
This work provides a method for humanoid robots to navigate complex, obstacle-rich environments with disconnected safe footholds, improving their autonomy and robustness.
This paper addresses humanoid locomotion over disconnected footholds by proposing a perceptive mixed-integer model predictive control framework. It jointly plans foot placement and step duration, generating terrain-aware and dynamically consistent footstep sequences with adaptive timing and millisecond-level solve times in simulation, even under external pushes.
Many real-world walking scenarios contain obstacles and unsafe ground patches (e.g., slippery or cluttered areas), leaving a disconnected set of admissible footholds that can be modeled as stepping-stone-like regions. We propose an onboard, perceptive mixed-integer model predictive control framework that jointly plans foot placement and step duration using step-to-step Divergent Component of Motion (DCM) dynamics. Ego-centric depth images are fused into a probabilistic local heightmap, from which we extract a union of convex steppable regions. Region membership is enforced with binary variables in a mixed-integer quadratic program (MIQP). To keep the optimization tractable while certifying safety, we embed capturability bounds in the DCM space: a lateral one-step condition (preventing leg crossing) and a sagittal infinite-step bound that limits unstable growth. We further re-plan within the step by back-propagating the measured instantaneous DCM to update the initial DCM, improving robustness to model mismatch and external disturbances. We evaluate the approach in simulation on Digit on randomized stepping-stone fields, including external pushes. The planner generates terrain-aware, dynamically consistent footstep sequences with adaptive timing and millisecond-level solve times.