UniExo: Unified Multi-Skill Policies for Musculoskeletal Locomotion and Co-Adaptive Exoskeleton Control

📅 2026-09-17
📈 Citations: 0
Influential: 0
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🤖 AI Summary
本文提出UniExo框架,通过构建多技能肌肉骨骼策略并联合训练外骨骼控制策略,解决了外骨骼控制器需频繁切换模式的问题。
📝 Abstract
Daily locomotion encompasses diverse activities and frequent transitions between them, yet most exoskeleton controllers are designed for a single activity or a narrow set of related movements. Changes in activity therefore typically require explicit mode switching and separately tuned or retrained controllers. Simulation-based learning reduces the need for hardware-based tuning but generally retains this limitation. Here we present UniExo, a framework that first constructs a multi-skill musculoskeletal human policy and then jointly trains an exoskeleton control policy with it. Four single-skill imitation experts for walking, turning, running and backward walking are distilled into a single network structured by a skill latent and subsequently fine-tuned through reinforcement learning on transition sequences. The resultant unified human policy achieves a mean tracking success rate of 94.7% on unseen clips of the four skills and exhibits greater robustness to perturbations than its constituent experts. A single hip exoskeleton controller (UniExo) is initialized from hip moment prediction of the human policy and co-adapted with it through multi-agent reinforcement learning across the four skills. This co-adaptation shifts the timing of the assistance torque and raises the fraction of positive work delivered to the hip. When deployed on a custom hip exoskeleton, the controller generalizes across four treadmill speeds in six participants and assists one participant through a continuous route of all four skills and their transitions, without skill labels or explicit mode switching. UniExo thus provides a step towards replacing activity-specific controllers with unified, user-specific controllers that support diverse locomotor activities and the transitions between them.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

exoskeleton control
multi-skill policies
locomotion activities
mode switching
controller adaptation
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

multi-skill policies
co-adaptive exoskeleton control
reinforcement learning
skill latent
musculoskeletal locomotion
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