Musculoskeletal Motion Imitation for Learning Personalized Exoskeleton Control Policy in Impaired Gait

TL;DR

This paper presents a scalable, physiologically plausible musculoskeletal simulation framework using reinforcement learning to develop personalized exoskeleton control policies that improve gait and reduce metabolic cost in both healthy and impaired individuals.

Contribution

It introduces a device-agnostic, simulation-based reinforcement learning approach for personalized exoskeleton control applicable to clinical populations without extensive physical trials.

Findings

Control policies produce physiologically plausible assistive torques.

Policies reduce metabolic cost across walking speeds.

Impaired-gait models show improved symmetry and efficiency.

Abstract

Designing generalizable control policies for lower-limb exoskeletons remains fundamentally constrained by exhaustive data collection or iterative optimization procedures, which limit accessibility to clinical populations. To address this challenge, we introduce a device-agnostic framework that combines physiologically plausible musculoskeletal simulation with reinforcement learning to enable scalable personalized exoskeleton assistance for both able-bodied and clinical populations. Our control policies not only generate physiologically plausible locomotion dynamics but also capture clinically observed compensatory strategies under targeted muscular deficits, providing a unified computational model of both healthy and pathological gait. Without task-specific tuning, the resulting exoskeleton control policies produce assistive torque profiles at the hip and ankle that align with state-of-the-art profiles validated in human experiments, while consistently reducing metabolic cost across walking speeds. For simulated impaired-gait models, the learned control policies yield asymmetric, deficit-specific exoskeleton assistance that improves both energetic efficiency and bilateral kinematic symmetry without explicit prescription of the target gait pattern. These results demonstrate that physiologically plausible musculoskeletal simulation via reinforcement learning can serve as a scalable foundation for personalized exoskeleton control across both able-bodied and clinical populations, eliminating the need for extensive physical trials.