Autonomous climbing of spiral staircases with humanoids

Abstract

In this paper, we present an approach to enable a humanoid robot to autonomously climb up spiral staircases. This task is substantially more challenging than climbing straight stairs since careful repositioning is needed. Our system globally estimates the pose of the robot, which is subsequently refined by integrating visual observations. In this way, the robot can accurately determine its relative position with respect to the next step. We use a 3D model of the environment to project edges corresponding to stair contours into monocular camera images. By detecting edges in the images and associating them to projected model edges, the robot is able to accurately locate itself towards the stairs and to climb them. We present experiments carried out with a Nao humanoid equipped with a 2D laser range finder for global localization and a low-cost monocular camera for short-range sensing. As we show in the experiments, the robot reliably climbs up the steps of a spiral staircase.