STRIDER: Stepping-Enabled Multi-Gait Hierarchical 3D Loco-Manipulation Framework for Humanoid Robots
Humanoid loco-manipulation faces two prominent limitations: controllers using continuous velocity commands cannot precisely regulate individual footholds, while specialized foothold-tracking modules are difficult to integrate with whole-body manipulation. Furthermore, standard action-based imitation distillation primarily transfers expert actions, without explicitly encouraging a shared representation of heterogeneous skills. This paper introduces STRIDER, a hierarchical multi-gait framework to bridge these gaps. The framework integrates terrain-aware 3D stepping logic, Adversarial Motion Priors (AMP)-based natural walking, and Cartesian upper-body control: its stepping expert selects feasible footholds in the stance-foot frame and generates clearance-aware swing trajectories. To fuse distinct walking and stepping experts into one executable student policy, we propose Latent Distillation Proximal Policy Optimization (LD-PPO), a distillation algorithm augmented with teacher-conditioned latent alignment. By jointly optimizing on-policy reinforcement learning, DAgger-based action reconstruction, and latent alignment, LD-PPO transfers expert actions while encouraging a shared skill representation across heterogeneous modes. Simulation and real-robot evaluations on the TianGong Omni humanoid show that LD-PPO outperforms vanilla distillation-PPO in foothold-tracking and posture-tracking accuracy. Deployed on hardware, STRIDER realizes multi-gait loco-manipulation with accurate foothold and end-effector tracking.