Adaptive Gait Generation for Multi-Terrain Exoskeletons via Constrained Kernelized Movement Primitives

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel adaptive gait generation framework for lower limb exoskeletons that utilizes kernelized movement primitives and environmental sensing to enable real-time, environment-aware walking on diverse terrains.

Contribution

The paper presents a new KMP-based method for adaptive gait planning that learns from limited demonstrations and incorporates environmental data for real-time trajectory adaptation.

Findings

Validated in simulations across various terrains including stairs and obstacles.

Demonstrated real-world effectiveness on a commercial exoskeleton.

Proved robustness and adaptability in diverse indoor environments.

Abstract

Lower limb exoskeletons (LLEs) present the potential to make motor-impaired individuals walk again. Their application in real-world environments is still limited by the lack of effective adaptive gait planning. Indeed, current exoskeletons are meant to walk only on a flat and even terrain. Generating environment-aware, physiologically consistent gait trajectories in real-time is an open challenge. To overcome this, we propose a novel Kernelized Movement Primitives (KMP)-based framework for adaptive gait generation (AGG) across multiple indoor terrains. The proposed approach learns a probabilistic representation of human gait in both the joint and task spaces from a limited number of human demonstrations, representing natural gait characteristics and ensuring kinematic feasibility. In addition, the learned trajectories are adapted using environmental information extracted from an onboard RGB-D camera by treating the AGG as a linearly constrained optimization problem with via-points. The proposed method has been thoroughly validated first in simulations for gait generation in different scenarios, such as flat-ground walking, slopes, stairs, and obstacles crossing. Finally, the effectiveness and robustness of the method have been demonstrated with experiments on a commercial LLE in real-world scenarios. The results obtained demonstrate the feasibility of an environment-aware gait planning system for a new generation of intelligent lower limb exoskeletons for assisting people with disabilities in their every-day life.