The current state-of-the-art in quadruped locomotion is able to produce robust motion for terrain traversal but requires the segmentation of a desired robot trajectory into a discrete set of locomotion skills such as trot and crawl. In contrast, in this work we demonstrate the feasibility of learning a single, unified representation for quadruped locomotion enabling continuous blending between gait types and characteristics. We present Gaitor, which learns a disentangled representation of locomotion skills, thereby sharing information common to all gait types seen during training. The structure emerging in the learnt representation is interpretable in that it is found to encode phase correlations between the different gait types. These can be leveraged to produce continuous gait transitions. In addition, foot swing characteristics are disentangled and directly addressable. Together with a rudimentary terrain encoding and a learned planner operating in this structured latent representation, Gaitor is able to take motion commands including desired gait type and characteristics from a user while reacting to uneven terrain. We evaluate Gaitor in both simulated and real-world settings on the ANYmal C platform. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work learning such a unified and interpretable latent representation for multiple gaits, resulting in on-demand continuous blending between different locomotion modes on a real quadruped robot.

We introduce Walk4Me, a telehealth community mobility assessment system designed to facilitate early diagnosis, severity, and progression identification. Our system achieves this by 1) enabling early diagnosis, 2) identifying early indicators of clinical severity, and 3) quantifying and tracking the progression of the disease across the ambulatory phase of the disease. To accomplish this, we employ an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based detection of gait characteristics in patients and typically developing peers. Our system remotely and in real-time collects data from device sensors (e.g., acceleration from a mobile device, etc.) using our novel Walk4Me API. Our web application extracts temporal/spatial gait characteristics and raw data signal characteristics and then employs traditional machine learning and deep learning techniques to identify patterns that can 1) identify patients with gait disturbances associated with disease, 2) describe the degree of mobility limitation, and 3) identify characteristics that change over time with disease progression. We have identified several machine learning techniques that differentiate between patients and typically-developing subjects with 100% accuracy across the age range studied, and we have also identified corresponding temporal/spatial gait characteristics associated with each group. Our work demonstrates the potential of utilizing the latest advances in mobile device and machine learning technology to measure clinical outcomes regardless of the point of care, inform early clinical diagnosis and treatment decision-making, and monitor disease progression.

While the Vision Transformer has been used in gait recognition, its application in multi-view gait recognition is still limited. Different views significantly affect the extraction and identification accuracy of the characteristics of gait contour. To address this, this paper proposes a Siamese Mobile Vision Transformer (SMViT). This model not only focuses on the local characteristics of the human gait space but also considers the characteristics of long-distance attention associations, which can extract multi-dimensional step status characteristics. In addition, it describes how different perspectives affect gait characteristics and generate reliable perspective feature relationship factors. The average recognition rate of SMViT on the CASIA B data set reached 96.4%. The experimental results show that SMViT can attain state-of-the-art performance compared to advanced step recognition models such as GaitGAN, Multi_view GAN, Posegait and other gait recognition models.

Fall is a leading cause of death which suffers the elderly and society. Timed Up and Go (TUG) test is a common tool for fall risk assessment. In this paper, we propose a method for predicting TUG score from gait characteristics extracted from video based on computer vision and machine learning technologies. First, 3D pose is estimated from video captured with 2D and 3D cameras during human motion and then a group of gait characteristics are computed from 3D pose series. After that, copula entropy is used to select those characteristics which are mostly associated with TUG score. Finally, the selected characteristics are fed into the predictive models to predict TUG score. Experiments on real world data demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method. As a byproduct, the associations between TUG score and several gait characteristics are discovered, which laid the scientific foundation of the proposed method and make the predictive models such built interpretable to clinical users.