FastStair: Learning to Run Up Stairs with Humanoid Robots

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10365v1
• Date: Thu, 15 Jan 2026 13:14:59 GMT
• Title: FastStair: Learning to Run Up Stairs with Humanoid Robots
• Abstract summary: Running up stairs is effortless for humans but difficult for humanoid robots.<n>FastStair is a planner-guided, multi-stage learning framework to achieve fast and stable stair ascent.<n>We deploy the resulting controller on the Oli humanoid robot, achieving stable stair ascent at commanded speeds up to 1.65 m/s.
• Score: 19.796528911795516
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• 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.

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