Yuxi Liu, Lijun Han, Ziming Wang, Ao Zhang, Cong Yang, Wei Sui
Foothold-constrained terrain limits feasible footholds to sparse, discontinuous, or narrow support regions, as in gaps, stepping stones, stairs, and balance beams. In such settings, a single misplaced step can cause a fall. Reliable traversal therefore requires precise foot placement and anticipation of upcoming terrain. To address this challenge, we present World-Model-Augmented Visual Locomotion (WM-LOCO), which augments a visual locomotion policy with predictive context from a jointly trained world model. Given onboard depth observations and proprioception, a recurrent state-space model (RSSM) learns action-conditioned latent dynamics that predict future proprioceptive states, egocentric observations, and task rewards. The resulting recurrent feature is then fed into the proximal policy optimization (PPO) actor-critic, providing predictive context for anticipatory foot placement on foothold-constrained terrain. WM-LOCO achieves average success rates of 96.0% on gaps, 96.9% on stepping stones, 94.0% on stairs, and 92.1% on balance beams, outperforming the evaluated baselines while improving gait efficiency and smoothness. Furthermore, WM-LOCO achieves zero-shot sim-to-real transfer to a Unitree G1, with 92.5% success across these four terrain classes.
To reduce reliance on manual design and extensive parameter tuning, a framework for the autonomous evolution of exoskeleton assistance policies through human feedback is proposed. Assistance policies are autonomously generated as executable control code by an intelligent agent and evaluated in experiments with human participants. Subjective user feedback, movement performance, and muscle activation measurements are incorporated into policy assessment. Based on these assessments, policy deficiencies are autonomously identified and the control code is revised by the agent for subsequent trials. A closed loop of policy generation, human feedback, evaluation, and autonomous refinement is thereby established. The framework is evaluated using GPT, DeepSeek, GLM, and Kimi, and initial assistance performance and refinement outcomes are compared across models. Despite differences in initial performance, effective assistance is achieved with all four models after a single autonomous refinement iteration under the tested conditions. Across three tasks, biceps and triceps muscle activation levels are reduced by 29.4% and 35.2%, respectively, compared with those measured without an exoskeleton. However, limited adaptability to unexpected situations is observed, indicating that further improvements in robustness and safety are required.
Muyuan Ma, Long Cheng, Lijun Han, Haotian Zhai, Xinpan Meng, Xiuze Xia, Houcheng Li, Zeyu Liu
Exoskeletons have shown great potential for augmenting human physical capabilities, yet generating reliable assistance remains challenging because human motion patterns and interaction requirements vary substantially in practice. To address this problem, a dual-loop assistance strategy is proposed to couple multimodal exoskeleton trajectory generation with variable admittance control, where trajectory variance links the outer-loop generator and the inner-loop controller. The generator synthesizes future exoskeleton trajectories through denoising, primarily using whole-body human motion and exoskeleton proprioception, with task descriptions as auxiliary semantic cues. To reduce cross-modal representation mismatch, a three-stage training pipeline is introduced to progressively optimize the human motion encoder, the exoskeleton proprioception encoder, and the trajectory generator. In the inner loop, multiple future trajectories are sampled from the generator to estimate the trajectory mean and variance. The mean is used as the control reference, while the variance provides an uncertainty measure for prediction reliability. This measure is further incorporated into a stiffness regulation law, enabling compliant assistance with input-to-state stability under bounded lumped interaction input. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly reduces muscle activation levels compared with standard baselines, while also decreasing users' metabolic energy expenditure relative to the unassisted condition.
Jinyu Zhang, Lijun Han, Feng Jian, Lingxi Zhang, Hesheng Wang
In mobile robot shared control, effectively understanding human motion intention is critical for seamless human-robot collaboration. This paper presents a novel shared control framework featuring planning-level intention prediction. A path replanning algorithm is designed to adjust the robot's desired trajectory according to inferred human intentions. To represent future motion intentions, we introduce the concept of an intention domain, which serves as a constraint for path replanning. The intention-domain prediction and path replanning problems are jointly formulated as a Markov Decision Process and solved through deep reinforcement learning. In addition, a Voronoi-based human trajectory generation algorithm is developed, allowing the model to be trained entirely in simulation without human participation or demonstration data. Extensive simulations and real-world user studies demonstrate that the proposed method significantly reduces operator workload and enhances safety, without compromising task efficiency compared with existing assistive teleoperation approaches.