Gait-Adaptive Perceptive Humanoid Locomotion With Real-Time Under-Base Terrain Reconstruction

Abstract

For full-size humanoid robots, reliable locomotion on complex terrains—such as long staircases—remains challenging, even with recent advances in reinforcement-learning-based control. In such settings, limited perception, ambiguous terrain cues, and insufficient adaptation of gait timing can cause even a single misplaced or mistimed step to result in rapid loss of balance. We introduce a perceptive locomotion framework that merges terrain sensing, gait regulation, and whole-body control into a single reinforcement learning policy. A downward-facing depth camera mounted under the base observes the support region around the feet, and a compact U-Net reconstructs a dense egocentric height map from each frame in real time, operating at the same frequency as the control loop. The perceptual height map, together with proprioceptive observations, is processed by a unified policy that produces joint commands and a global stepping-phase signal, allowing gait timing and whole-body posture to be adapted jointly to the commanded motion and local terrain geometry. We further adopt a single-stage successive teacher–student training scheme for efficient policy learning and knowledge transfer. Experiments conducted on a 31-DoF, 1.65 m humanoid robot demonstrate robust locomotion in both simulation and real-world settings, including forward and backward stair ascent and descent, as well as crossing a 46 cm gap. Project page: <uri xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://ga-phl.github.io/</uri>.