Bracing for Impact: Robust Humanoid Push Recovery and Locomotion with Reduced Order Models

Push recovery during locomotion will facilitate the deployment of humanoid robots in human-centered environments. In this paper, we present a unified framework for walking control and push recovery for humanoid robots, leveraging the arms for push recovery while dynamically walking. The key innovation is to use the environment, such as walls, to facilitate push recovery by combining Single Rigid Body model predictive control (SRB-MPC) with Hybrid Linear Inverted Pendulum (HLIP) dynamics to enable robust locomotion, push detection, and recovery by utilizing the robot's arms to brace against such walls and dynamically adjusting the desired contact forces and stepping patterns. Extensive simulation results on a humanoid robot demonstrate improved perturbation rejection and tracking performance compared to HLIP alone, with the robot able to recover from pushes up to 100N for 0.2s while walking at commanded speeds up to 0.5m/s. Robustness is further validated in scenarios with angled walls and multi-directional pushes.

@article{yang2025_2505.11495,
  title={ Bracing for Impact: Robust Humanoid Push Recovery and Locomotion with Reduced Order Models },
  author={ Lizhi Yang and Blake Werner and Adrian B.Ghansah and Aaron D. Ames },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.11495},
  year={ 2025 }
}