Wandercraft's Personal Exoskeleton is about helping people stand tall, connect with others and live life on their own terms. For Caroline Laubach, being a Wandercraft test pilot is about more than just trying out new technology. It's about reclaiming a sense of freedom and connection that many wheelchair users miss. Laubach, a spinal stroke survivor and full-time wheelchair user, has played a key role in demonstrating the personal AI-powered prototype exoskeleton's development, and her experience highlights just how life-changing this device can be. "When I'm in the exoskeleton, I feel more free than I do in my daily life," said Laubach.

Every weekend warrior knows the drill -- you sit in front of a computer all week, and when the weekend hits, you bike, hike, and run yourself ragged. Your body feels destroyed on Monday. If this sounds like you -- or even if you're a casual exerciser who wants to walk and bike longer distances without getting tired -- the future has arrived. The world's first-ever outdoor exoskeleton, Hypershell X, can help max out your physical abilities with minimal effort. Hypershell X is causing a buzz among both outdoorsy types and robotics enthusiasts, and it won the Best of Innovation in Robotics award at CES 2025.

Thousands of people in Gaza require artificial limbs after being maimed in Israeli attacks. Technicians are making prosthetic arms and legs from recycled materials as medical supplies are blocked by Israel's siege.

Gait asymmetry is a significant clinical characteristic of hemiplegic gait that most stroke survivors suffer, leading to limited mobility and long-term negative impacts on their quality of life. Although a variety of exoskeleton controls have been developed for robot-assisted gait rehabilitation, little attention has been paid to correcting the gait asymmetry of stroke patients following the assist-as-need (AAN) principle, and it is still challenging to properly share control between the exoskeleton and stroke patients with partial motor control. In view of this, this article proposes an AAN hip exoskeleton control with human-in-the-loop optimization to correct gait asymmetry in stroke patients. To realize the AAN concept, an objective function was designed for real-time evaluation of the subject's gait performance and active participation, which considers the variability of natural human movement and guides the online tuning of control parameters on a subject-specific basis. In this way, patients were stimulated to contribute as much as possible to movement, thus maximizing the efficiency and outcomes of post-stroke gait rehabilitation. Finally, an experimental study was conducted to verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed AAN control on healthy subjects with artificial gait impairment. For the first time, the common hypothesis that AAN controls can improve human active participation was validated from the biomechanics viewpoint.

Hand exoskeletons have significant potential in labor-intensive fields by mitigating hand grip fatigue, enhancing hand strength, and preventing injuries.However, most traditional hand exoskeletons are driven by motors whose output force is limited under constrained installation conditions. In addition, they also come with the disadvantages of high power consumption, complex and bulky assistive systems, and high instability.In this work, we develop a novel hand exoskeleton integrated with magnetorheological (MR) clutches that offers a high force-to-power ratio to improve grip endurance. The clutch features an enhanced structure design, a micro roller enhancing structure, which can significantly boost output forces. The experimental data demonstrate that the clutch can deliver a peak holding force of 380 N with a consumption of 1.48 W, yielding a force-to-power ratio of 256.75N/W, which is 2.35 times higher than the best reported actuator used for hand exoskeletons. The designed MR hand exoskeleton is highly integrated and comprises an exoskeleton frame, MR clutches, a control unit, and a battery. Evaluations through static grip endurance tests and dynamic carrying and lifting tests confirm that the MR hand exoskeleton can effectively reduce muscle fatigue, extend grip endurance, and minimize injuries. These findings highlight its strong potential for practical applications in repetitive tasks such as carrying and lifting in industrial settings.

Details of the Model Architecture The detailed encoder architecture is depicted in Figure 7. Some implementation details that we use in the decoder, and the decoder architecture are depicted in Figure 8. We design the grouped 1x1 convolutions to be able to mix channels. For each group, the same number of channels are extracted from one half of the feature map separated by coupling layers and the other half, respectively. Figure 8c shows an example.

In this work, we introduce the principle, design and mechatronics of Exo-Muscle, a novel assistive device for the knee joint. Different from the existing systems based on rigid exoskeleton structures or soft-tendon driven approaches, the proposed device leverages a new semi-rigid principle that explores the benefits of both rigid and soft systems. The use of a novel semi-rigid chain mechanism around the knee joint eliminates the presence of misalignment between the device and the knee joint center of rotation, while at the same time, it forms a well-defined route for the tendon. This results in more deterministic load compensation functionality compared to the fully soft systems. The proposed device can provide up to 38Nm assistive torque to the knee joint. In the experiment section, the device was successfully validated through a series of experiments demonstrating the capacity of the device to provide the target assistive functionality in the knee joint.

Spasticity is a common movement disorder symptom in individuals with cerebral palsy, hereditary spastic paraplegia, spinal cord injury and stroke, being one of the most disabling features in the progression of these diseases. Despite the potential benefit of using wearable robots to treat spasticity, their use is not currently recommended to subjects with a level of spasticity above ${1^+}$ on the Modified Ashworth Scale. The varying dynamics of this velocity-dependent tonic stretch reflex make it difficult to deploy safe personalized controllers. Here, we describe a novel adaptive torque controller via deep reinforcement learning (RL) for a knee exoskeleton under joint spasticity conditions, which accounts for task performance and interaction forces reduction. To train the RL agent, we developed a digital twin, including a musculoskeletal-exoskeleton system with joint misalignment and a differentiable spastic reflexes model for the muscles activation. Results for a simulated knee extension movement showed that the agent learns to control the exoskeleton for individuals with different levels of spasticity. The proposed controller was able to reduce maximum torques applied to the human joint under spastic conditions by an average of 10.6\% and decreases the root mean square until the settling time by 8.9\% compared to a conventional compliant controller.

--In rehabilitation, powered, and teleoperation exoskeletons, connecting the human body to the exoskeleton through binding attachments is a common configuration. However, the uncertainty of the tightness and the donning deviation of the binding attachments will affect the flexibility and comfort of the exoskeletons, especially during high-speed movement. T o address this challenge, this paper presents a flexible exoskeleton control approach with binding alignment and full-arm coordination. Firstly, the sources of the force interaction caused by donning offsets are analyzed, based on which the interactive force data is classified into the major, assistant, coordination, and redundant component categories. Then, a binding alignment strategy (BAS) is proposed to reduce the donning disturbances by combining different force data. Furthermore, we propose a full-arm coordination mechanism (FCM) that focuses on two modes of arm movement intent, joint-oriented and target-oriented, to improve the flexible performance of the whole exoskeleton control during high-speed motion. In this method, we propose an algorithm to distinguish the two intentions to resolve the conflict issue of the force component. Finally, a series of experiments covering various aspects of exoskeleton performance (flexibility, adaptability, accuracy, speed, and fatigue) were conducted to demonstrate the benefits of our control framework in our full-arm exoskeleton. Upper limb exoskeletons have various applications in rehabilitation [1], [2], powered assistance [3], teleoperation [4], and other scenarios [5]. In addition to the design of the mechanism and system in upper limb exoskeleton research [6], [2], [7], another crucial research area is the control of exoskeletons [8], [9], [10], [11]. In these fields, the flexibility of the exoskeleton is an important performance (i.e., the force required by users to drive the exoskeleton) that directly affects the user experience and the operational feel. Especially for teleoperation exoskeletons, researchers expect that exoskeleton control can allow users to operate the exoskeleton freely, comfortably, and effortlessly, similar to the natural movement of their arms. In powered assistance and rehabilitation applications, the control objective can also serve as the baseline, which adds assistance or resistance force by adjusting the control gain. Therefore, research into fast and flexible exoskeleton control is particularly important.