FastStair: Learning to Run Up Stairs with Humanoid Robots

TL;DR

FastStair is a hybrid learning framework that combines model-based planning and reinforcement learning to enable humanoid robots to ascend stairs quickly and safely, outperforming previous methods.

Contribution

The paper introduces FastStair, a novel multi-stage learning approach integrating a model-based foothold planner with RL, achieving fast and stable stair ascent for humanoid robots.

Findings

Achieved stair ascent speeds up to 1.65 m/s.

Successfully traversed a 33-step spiral staircase in 12 seconds.

Won the Canton Tower Robot Run Up Competition.

Abstract

Running up stairs is effortless for humans but remains extremely challenging for humanoid robots due to the simultaneous requirements of high agility and strict stability. Model-free reinforcement learning (RL) can generate dynamic locomotion, yet implicit stability rewards and heavy reliance on task-specific reward shaping tend to result in unsafe behaviors, especially on stairs; conversely, model-based foothold planners encode contact feasibility and stability structure, but enforcing their hard constraints often induces conservative motion that limits speed. We present FastStair, a planner-guided, multi-stage learning framework that reconciles these complementary strengths to achieve fast and stable stair ascent. FastStair integrates a parallel model-based foothold planner into the RL training loop to bias exploration toward dynamically feasible contacts and to pretrain a safety-focused base policy. To mitigate planner-induced conservatism and the discrepancy between low- and high-speed action distributions, the base policy was fine-tuned into speed-specialized experts and then integrated via Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to enable smooth operation across the full commanded-speed range. We deploy the resulting controller on the Oli humanoid robot, achieving stable stair ascent at commanded speeds up to 1.65 m/s and traversing a 33-step spiral staircase (17 cm rise per step) in 12 s, demonstrating robust high-speed performance on long staircases. Notably, the proposed approach served as the champion solution in the Canton Tower Robot Run Up Competition.