UniExo is a framework that builds a single, multi-skill musculoskeletal human policy by distilling four imitation experts—walking, turning, running, and backward walking—into one network guided by a skill latent. The human policy is fine‑tuned with reinforcement learning on transition sequences, achieving a 94.7% tracking success rate on unseen clips and greater robustness to perturbations. A hip exoskeleton controller is then co‑adapted with this human policy via multi‑agent reinforcement learning, enabling it to assist across four treadmill speeds and a continuous route of all four skills without explicit mode switching.
By Yifei Yuan, Jakob Wolf, Ghaith Androwis, Xianlian Zhou
The paper compares two leading motion‑imitation reinforcement learning pipelines—HyFyDy, which uses detailed musculotendon modeling, and MuJoCo, which focuses on computational speed. Using the same human motion‑capture and EMG data, both pipelines reproduce kinematics similarly, but HyFyDy’s muscle activation predictions align more closely with experimental EMG (RMSE 0.164, r = 0.4) than MuJoCo’s (RMSE 0.344, r = 0.11). The authors conclude that HyFyDy’s higher physiological realism makes it currently more suitable for musculoskeletal modeling, though both systems need further development for GPU‑parallelizable environments and robotic assistive‑device design.
By Ayah G. Ahmad, Claire E. Borden, Maegan Tucker
arXiv:2609.16697v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: World models connect perception and decision-making in embodied intelligence by maintaining hidden state, anticipating consequences, comparing interv...
By Nanjie Yao, Hao Wang, Chong Cheng, Zhikang Chen, Wenzhe Li, Jiafei Lyu, Li Shen, Peilin Zhao, Zongqing Lu, Gao Huang, Steven Hoi, Dacheng Tao, Deheng Ye
arXiv:2604. 08780v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: World models promise a paradigm shift in robotics, where an agent learns the physics of its environment once and then acquires behaviors efficiently.
By Mohamad H. Danesh, Chenhao Li, Amin Abyaneh, Anas Houssaini, Kirsty Ellis, Glen Berseth, Marco Hutter, Hsiu-Chin Lin
The paper introduces the λ-hold controller, a minimal-task-reward approach inspired by the equilibrium-point hypothesis, to train a muscle-actuated skeletal model for human-like sprinting. By fixing each muscle’s EP threshold length λ over gait-phase intervals, the controller dramatically reduces the action space and the frequency of policy queries, enabling efficient exploration and learning within an hour of training. This method demonstrates that physiologically grounded control can produce realistic human motion in predictive musculoskeletal simulations.
By Jun Hyuk Lee, Chihyeong Lee, Jooeun Ahn
The paper introduces a Reflex-Informed Neuromuscular Reinforcement Learning framework for muscle-driven locomotion. It combines a fixed phase-dependent reflex controller with a reinforcement learning policy that adjusts reflex gains and thresholds for hip swing, knee support, and ankle propulsion. Experiments show the method produces physiologically plausible walking with improved kinematic accuracy, dynamic consistency, symmetry, and stride consistency, and remains robust to muscle weakness and perturbations without retraining.
By Jian Zhou, Xingyu Zhang, Rui Ma, Yu Cao, Shane Xie, Zhi-qiang Zhang
arXiv:2609.38653v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Recent advances in musculoskeletal modeling and reinforcement learning have enabled muscle-actuated agents to reproduce increasingly complex human mo...
By Merkourios Simos, Chengkun Li, Bianca Ziliotto, Alexander Mathis
arXiv:2507. 06219v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Data scaling has driven remarkable success in foundation models for Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computer Vision (CV), yet the principles of effective data scaling in robotic manipulation remain insufficiently understood.
By Modi Shi, Li Chen, Jin Chen, Yuxiang Lu, Chiming Liu, Guanghui Ren, Ping Luo, Di Huang, Maoqing Yao, Hongyang Li
arXiv:2608. 01506v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Humans readily adapt their movements as their bodies change through aging, injury, or load carrying, but learning-based robot policies often break when hardware properties shift.
By Dichen Li, Bo Ai, Nico Bohlinger, Jan Peters, Hao Su, Henrik I. Christensen
arXiv:2609.17042v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Learning flexible motor primitives is a hallmark of skilled motor control. Recent neuroscience theory proposes that motor primitives may be implemented...
By Sreejan Kumar, Marcelo Mattar, Lea Duncker
The paper discusses how robotic embodiment—sensing, kinematics, dynamics, geometry, actuation, and control—varies across robots and over time, and argues that general embodied intelligence must learn across these differences. It critiques current methods that engineer correspondences for short‑term gains, proposing instead that learning should discover representations that enable transfer across a broader range of embodiments as experience accumulates. The authors advocate for embodiment diversity as a scaling axis, broad learned priors as a complementary ingredient, and evaluations that better characterize embodiment gaps and transfer performance, linking practical cross‑embodiment learning to the scientific pursuit of physical intelligence that adapts with its embodiments.
By Bo Ai, Henrik I. Christensen, Hao Su
MyoMechanix is a multimodal dataset and framework for action quality assessment that incorporates muscle activity and other physiological signals alongside visual data. It contains over 7,500 samples of 20 weight‑loaded actions from 38 subjects, with synchronized RGB video, 3D pose, sEMG, and additional signals. The accompanying Fitness Knowledge Graph structures expert annotations into relationships among actions, phases, key steps, errors, and corrective feedback, enabling compositional scoring and interpretable assessment through the CUBIST engine. The project also introduces MyoMechanix‑AQA, MyoMechanix‑VideoQA, and a novel MyoMechanix‑Video2EMG task, demonstrating that multimodal sensing and structured representations improve performance, interpretability, and error attribution.
By Hao Yin, Paritosh Parmar, Lijun Gu, Lin Xu, Tianxiao Guo, Xiujin Liu, Tianyou Zheng, Yang Zhang, Weiwei Fu