Many assistive robotic devices have been developed to augment or assist human locomotion. Despite advancements in design and control algorithms, this task remains challenging. Human walking strategies are unique and complex, and assistance strategies based on the dynamics of unassisted locomotion typically offer only modest reductions to the metabolic cost of walking. Recently, human-in-the-loop (HIL) methodologies have been used to identify subject-specific assistive strategies, which offer significant improvements to energy savings. However, current implementations suffer from long measurement times, necessitating the use of low-dimensional control parameterizations, and possibly requiring multiday collection protocols to avoid subject fatigue. We present a HIL methodology, which optimizes the assistive torques provided by a powered hip exoskeleton. Using musculoskeletal modeling, we are able to evaluate simulated metabolic rate online. We applied our methodology to identify assistive torque profiles for seven subjects walking on a treadmill, and found greater reductions to metabolic cost when compared to generic or off-the-shelf controllers. In a secondary investigation, we directly compare simulated and measured metabolic rate for three subjects experiencing a range of assistance levels. The time investment required to identify assistance strategies via our protocol is significantly lower when compared to existing protocols relying on calorimetry. In the future, frameworks such as these could be used to enable shorter HIL protocols or exploit more complex control parameterizations for greater energy savings.

Currently for balance recovery, humans outperform humanoid robots which use hand-designed controllers in terms of the diverse actions. This study aims to close this gap by finding core control principles that are shared across ankle, hip, toe and stepping strategies by formulating experiments to test human balance recoveries and define criteria to quantify the strategy in use. To reveal fundamental principles of balance strategies, our study shows that a minimum jerk controller can accurately replicate comparable human behaviour at the Centre of Mass level. Therefore, we formulate a general Model-Predictive Control (MPC) framework to produce recovery motions in any system, including legged machines, where the framework parameters are tuned for time-optimal performance in robotic systems.

Legged robots have great potential to perform complex loco-manipulation tasks, yet it is challenging to keep the robot balanced while it interacts with the environment. In this paper we investigated the use of additional contact points for maximising the robustness of loco-manipulation motions. Specifically, body-ground contact was studied for its ability to enhance robustness and manipulation capabilities of quadrupedal robots. We proposed equipping the robot with prongs: small legs rigidly attached to the body which create body-ground contact at controllable point-contacts. The effect of these prongs on robustness was quantified by computing the Smallest Unrejectable Force (SUF), a measure of robustness related to Feasible Wrench Polytopes. We applied the SUF to evaluate the robustness of the system, and proposed an effective approximation of the SUF that can be computed at near-real-time speed. We developed a hierarchical quadratic programming based whole-body controller that can control stable interaction when the prongs are in contact with the ground. This novel prong concept and complementary control framework were implemented on hardware to validate their effectiveness by showing increased robustness and newly enabled loco-manipulation tasks, such as obstacle clearance and manipulation of a large object.

This paper presents a deep learning framework that is capable of solving partially observable locomotion tasks based on our novel interpretation of Recurrent Deterministic Policy Gradient (RDPG). We study on bias of sampled error measure and its variance induced by the partial observability of environment and subtrajectory sampling, respectively. Three major improvements are introduced in our RDPG based learning framework: tail-step bootstrap of temporal difference, initialisation of hidden state using past subtrajectory, truncation of temporal backpropagation, and injection of external experiences learned by other agents. The proposed learning framework was implemented to solve the Bipedal-Walker challenge in OpenAI's gym simulation environment where only partial state information is available. Our simulation study shows that the autonomous behaviors generated by the RDPG agent are highly adaptive to a variety of obstacles and enables the agent to effectively traverse rugged terrains for long distance with higher success rate than leading contenders.