Learning Cooperative Primitives with physical Human-Robot Interaction for a HUman-powered Lower EXoskeleton

Human-powered lower exoskeletons have gained considerable interests from both academia and industry over the past few decades, and thus have seen increasing applications in areas of human locomotion assistance and strength augmentation. One of the most important aspects in those applications is to achieve robust control of lower exoskeletons, which, in the first place, requires the proactive modeling of human movement trajectories through physical Human-Robot Interaction (pHRI). As a powerful representation tool for motion trajectories, Dynamic Movement Primitive (DMP) has been used extensively to model human movement trajectories. However, canonical DMPs only offers a general offline representation of human movement trajectory and neglects the real-time interaction term, therefore it cannot be directly applied to lower exoskeletons which need to model human motion trajectories online since different pilots have different trajectories and even one pilot might change his/her intended trajectory during walking. This paper presents a novel Coupled Cooperative Primitives (CCPs) scheme, which models the motion trajectories online. Besides maintaining canonical motion primitives, we also model the interaction term between the pilot and exoskeletons through impedance models and apply a reinforcement learning method based on Policy Improvement and Path Integrals (PI2) to learn the parameters online. Experimental results on both a single Degree-Of-Freedom (DOF) platform and a HUman-powered Augmentation Lower EXoskeleton (HUALEX) system demonstrate the advantages of our proposed CCP scheme.