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
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
arXiv:2508. 18066v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Controlling high-dimensional and nonlinear musculoskeletal models of the human body is a foundational scientific challenge.
By Boshi An, Alberto Silvio Chiappa, Merkourios Simos, Chengkun Li, Alexander Mathis
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:2610.02196v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: We study test-time evolution for humanoid loco-manipulation: solving tasks that a controller was never trained for by repurposing its existing skills...
By Zhuo Lin, Sirui Xu, Liuyu Bian, Yu-Xiong Wang, Liang-Yan Gui
Accurate contact prediction is useful for robotic manipulation only if it supports effective decisions. We investigate this connection using a compact, randomly initialized visuotactile world model, t...