Manaen

Personalized Exoskeleton Simulation

School: Carnegie Mellon University

Lab: MetaMobility Lab

PI: Inseung Kang

Supervisors: Yi-Hung Chiu, Nate Shoemaker-Trejo

Duration: Jan 2024 – Dec 2024

Funding: CMU SURF & SURG Scholarships

Publication: IEEE ICORR 2025

Overview

For one year, I worked in the MetaMobility Lab on simulation methods for personalized robotic hip exoskeletons. The long-term goal is to reduce the costly and uncomfortable process of physically tuning exoskeletons on patients by developing a simulation pipeline that can imitate individual gait patterns and test exoskeleton assistance before human trials. My SURF project was featured in a 2025 CMU News article highlighting undergraduate researchers contributing to accessibility-focused technologies.

Research Focus

How can human gait data and physics-informed simulation be used to build a personalized exoskeleton–human model for training adaptive walking assistance?

My Role

I contributed primarily to the data, simulation, and tooling aspects of the project. My work included:

Data & Simulation

  • Processed Georgia Tech motion capture gait datasets

  • Attempted direct import of gait trajectories into Locomujoco (MuJoCo skeletal agent)

  • Adjusted skeletal body parameters and improved model stability and usability

  • Modeled early versions of the lab’s hip exoskeleton in MuJoCo

Pipeline & Tools

  • Helped organize and clean the IL/RL training pipeline

  • Generated plots, diagrams, and visualizations for internal use and for publication

  • Assisted with figure preparation and supplementary materials for the ICORR paper

IEEE ICORR 2025 Paper Pipeline

Lab Contributions

  • Designed and built the first lab website

  • Worked on an early MIT-collaborative project involving a destabilizing backpack

  • Supported graduate student workflows with debugging, simulation checks, and analysis tasks

  • Contributed to writing sections and organizational work for the final paper

Skills

  • Python

  • MuJoCo / Locomujoco

  • Motion Data Processing

  • Simulation Modeling

  • Plotting & Visualization

  • Technical Writing

  • Research Collaboration

Publication

Learning Speed-Adaptive Walking Agent Using Imitation Learning with Physics-Informed Simulation
IEEE ICORR 2025

Presentation

3MT SURF Talk (2024): 3-minute presentation of my research.

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