Search arXiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2610.15563

Anticipatory Textile MMG-Strain Sensing for Confirm-Then-Assist Soft Knee Exosuits

Zheng Ma·Xiao Jin·Zhenhua Yu
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Soft wearable robots must commit to assistance around movement onset, when the available signals are ambiguous. Surface electromyography (sEMG) detects neuromuscular drive early but degrades under sweat and electrode shift, and kinematic sensors respond only once the limb moves. This letter presents a knitted textile interface that co-samples a three-channel mechanomyography (MMG) array and an anterior strain sensor on a single synchronous 500 Hz clock. Across five participants, MMG activation preceded strain-detected knee motion during sit-to-stand by per-channel medians of 322-344 ms. Sampled on the same clock, the sign of the strain slope resolved movement direction on 649 of 650 completed transitions with no training or per-participant calibration, raising four-class balanced accuracy from 90.3% to 95.6%. The fused signals drove a two-stage confirm-then-assist policy for a soft pneumatic knee. Across 240 trials in four participants, the onboard controller entered the assist state on 78 of 80 sit-to-stand trials and on none of the 80 isometric co-contractions. It also entered the assist state on 27 of 80 stand-to-sit trials and left it at the hold timeout, motivating an antagonistic flexor gauge to resolve this direction at onset. Co-sampling muscle acoustics with textile strain on one clock lets the inflation command be issued around movement onset.

Explore related subjects

cs.RO

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Zheng Ma, Xiao Jin, Zhenhua Yu. 2026-10-11. Anticipatory Textile MMG-Strain Sensing for Confirm-Then-Assist Soft Knee Exosuits. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15563

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Active Exploration in Bayesian Model-based Reinforcement Learning for Robot Manipulation

Efficiently tackling multiple tasks within complex environments, such as those found in robot manipulation, remains an ongoing challenge in robotics and an opportunity for data-driven solutions such as reinforcement learning (RL). The high cost of data gathering in robotics encourages data-efficient approaches such as model-based RL, which builds a dynamic model of the robot to conduct most policy learning on cheaper simulations, while enabling data reuse and transfer between tasks. In this work, we employ Bayesian deep learning (BDL) with a double purpose. First, we increase the model quality by improving its calibration. Second, we improve data efficiency by performing active learning of the dynamic model during a preliminary exploration phase, actively estimating the information gain of each transition and using it as the exploration reward. We compare several BDL methods in a realistic robot manipulation setup. Our experiments show that our approach matches the quality of relevant alternatives with much lower robot execution requirements and, unlike previous studies validated only on standard RL environments, we tackle robotic arm end-tasks on a complete manipulator simulator such as \texttt{CoppeliaSim}. Code is available at https://github.com/ropertunizar/BayesianActiveExploration.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

Don't Run with Scissors: Pruning Breaks VLA Models but They Can Be Recovered

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are a promising paradigm for field robotics, but their deployment is bottlenecked by strict edge SWaP-C constraints. Compression techniques such as quantization, distillation, and pruning are well-established for LLMs and VLMs. Pruning, however, remains particularly underexplored for VLA models. We surprisingly find that pruning VLA models yields drastic performance degradation and increased safety violations. Through spectral analysis, we identify structural properties of VLA weights that help explain this fragility. Based on this insight, we introduce GLUESTICK, a post-pruning recovery method that restores much of the original model's capability while preserving sparsity benefits. GLUESTICK computes a one-time corrective term by interpolating between the dense and pruned models in weight space. At inference, each pruned layer applies this correction to recover lost performance with minimal overhead. Our approach requires no additional training and is agnostic to the pruning algorithm. Across diverse VLA architectures and domains, GLUESTICK recovers up to 100% of the success rate and restores safety to near-dense levels, while saving up to 5 GB of memory and achieving up to 1.75x speedup. Additional material can be found at: https://gluestick-vla.github.io/

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

Schrödinger's Navigator: Imagining an Ensemble of Futures for Zero-Shot Object Navigation

Zero-shot object navigation (ZSON) requires robots to find target objects in unseen environments without task-specific fine-tuning or pre-built maps, a key capability for general-purpose service robots. Yet methods that perform well in simulation often degrade in cluttered real-world scenes with severe occlusion and latent hazards, where large unseen regions make single-scene inference brittle and unsafe. We propose Schrödinger's Navigator, a belief-aware framework that reasons at inference time over multiple trajectory-conditioned imagined 3D futures. Given candidate paths, a trajectory-conditioned 3D world model predicts hypothetical observations and maintains a superposition of plausible scene realizations rather than committing to one map. An adaptive occluder-aware sampler directs imagination to uncertainty-critical regions, while a Future-Aware Value Map (FAVM) aggregates imagined futures for robust, proactive action selection. Experiments in simulation and on a physical Go2 quadruped show that Schrödinger's Navigator outperforms strong ZSON baselines, improving hidden-target discovery and risk-aware waypoint selection in occlusion-heavy navigation scenarios. These results highlight imagined 3D futures as a scalable and generalizable strategy for zero-shot navigation in uncertain real-world environments.

cs.RO↗