Rapid Online Learning of Hip Exoskeleton Assistance Preferences

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Ramella, Giulia, Ijspeert, Auke, Bouri, Mohamed
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Ramella, Giulia
Ijspeert, Auke
Bouri, Mohamed
author_facet Ramella, Giulia
Ijspeert, Auke
Bouri, Mohamed
contents Hip exoskeletons are increasing in popularity due to their effectiveness across various scenarios and their ability to adapt to different users. However, personalizing the assistance often requires lengthy tuning procedures and computationally intensive algorithms, and most existing methods do not incorporate user feedback. In this work, we propose a novel approach for rapidly learning users' preferences for hip exoskeleton assistance. We perform pairwise comparisons of distinct randomly generated assistive profiles, and collect participants preferences through active querying. Users' feedback is integrated into a preference-learning algorithm that updates its belief, learns a user-dependent reward function, and changes the assistive torque profiles accordingly. Results from eight healthy subjects display distinct preferred torque profiles, and users' choices remain consistent when compared to a perturbed profile. A comprehensive evaluation of users' preferences reveals a close relationship with individual walking strategies. The tested torque profiles do not disrupt kinematic joint synergies, and participants favor assistive torques that are synchronized with their movements, resulting in lower negative power from the device. This straightforward approach enables the rapid learning of users preferences and rewards, grounding future studies on reward-based human-exoskeleton interaction.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_15366
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Rapid Online Learning of Hip Exoskeleton Assistance Preferences
Ramella, Giulia
Ijspeert, Auke
Bouri, Mohamed
Robotics
Hip exoskeletons are increasing in popularity due to their effectiveness across various scenarios and their ability to adapt to different users. However, personalizing the assistance often requires lengthy tuning procedures and computationally intensive algorithms, and most existing methods do not incorporate user feedback. In this work, we propose a novel approach for rapidly learning users' preferences for hip exoskeleton assistance. We perform pairwise comparisons of distinct randomly generated assistive profiles, and collect participants preferences through active querying. Users' feedback is integrated into a preference-learning algorithm that updates its belief, learns a user-dependent reward function, and changes the assistive torque profiles accordingly. Results from eight healthy subjects display distinct preferred torque profiles, and users' choices remain consistent when compared to a perturbed profile. A comprehensive evaluation of users' preferences reveals a close relationship with individual walking strategies. The tested torque profiles do not disrupt kinematic joint synergies, and participants favor assistive torques that are synchronized with their movements, resulting in lower negative power from the device. This straightforward approach enables the rapid learning of users preferences and rewards, grounding future studies on reward-based human-exoskeleton interaction.
title Rapid Online Learning of Hip Exoskeleton Assistance Preferences
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.15366