Learning task-parametrized assistive strategies for exoskeleton robots by multi-task reinforcement learning

Abstract

Recent studies suggest that reinforcement learning has great potential for generating assistive strategies in exoskeletons through physical interactions between a user and a robot. Previous methods focused on a task-specific assistive strategy, where for every single task (situation/context), the user needs to interact with a robot to learn an appropriate assistive strategy. Therefore, the learned strategies cannot be generalized for a new task. Since the sampling cost is expensive for such human-in-the-loop systems as exoskeletons, generalization must be enabled. In this paper, we propose to learn task-parametrized assistive strategies for exoskeleton robots. Our method employs an assistive strategy, which depends on the task parameter and the state variable, that can be learned from multiple sets of human-robot interaction data across different tasks and generalized even for an unseen task, given the task parameter without additional learning. To alleviate the user's burden in the learning process across multiple tasks, we exploit a data-efficient multi-task reinforcement learning framework. To verify the effectiveness of our method, we developed an experimental platform with an exoskeleton robot. We conducted a series of experiments whose experimental results show that our method can learn such a task-parametrized assistive strategy and be generalized for unseen tasks to reduce the user's electromyography signals (EMGs) during tasks.