Marine Petriaux

Jianeng Wang, Matias Mattamala, Christina Kassab et al.

Self-balancing exoskeletons are a key enabling technology for individuals with mobility impairments. While the current challenges focus on human-compliant hardware and control, unlocking their use for daily activities requires a scene perception system. In this work, we present Exosense, a vision-centric scene understanding system for self-balancing exoskeletons. We introduce a multi-sensor visual-inertial mapping device as well as a navigation stack for state estimation, terrain mapping and long-term operation. We tested Exosense attached to both a human leg and Wandercraft's Personal Exoskeleton in real-world indoor scenarios. This enabled us to test the system during typical periodic walking gaits, as well as future uses in multi-story environments. We demonstrate that Exosense can achieve an odometry drift of about 4 cm per meter traveled, and construct terrain maps under 1 cm average reconstruction error. It can also work in a visual localization mode in a previously mapped environment, providing a step towards long-term operation of exoskeletons.

Jianeng Wang, Matias Mattamala, Christina Kassab et al.

Self-balancing exoskeletons offer a promising mobility solution for individuals with lower-limb disabilities. For reliable long-term operation, these exoskeletons require a perception system that is effective in changing environments. In this work, we introduce LT-Exosense, a vision-centric, multi-session mapping system designed to support long-term (semi)-autonomous navigation for exoskeleton users. LT-Exosense extends single-session mapping capabilities by incrementally fusing spatial knowledge across multiple sessions, detecting environmental changes, and updating a persistent global map. This representation enables intelligent path planning, which can adapt to newly observed obstacles and can recover previous routes when obstructions are removed. We validate LT-Exosense through several real-world experiments, demonstrating a scalable multi-session map that achieves an average point-to-point error below 5 cm when compared to ground-truth laser scans. We also illustrate the potential application of adaptive path planning in dynamically changing indoor environments.