Stair Climbing Stabilization of the HRP-4 Humanoid Robot using Whole-body Admittance Control

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 walking stabilization based on linear inverted pendulum tracking [1] 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 HRP4 climbs an industrial staircase with 18.5 cm high steps, and release our walking controller as open source software.