Novel equilibrium-point control of agonist-antagonist system with pneumatic artificial muscles: II. Application to EMG-based human-machine interface for an elbow-joint system

Abstract

This paper presents an electromyographic-based human-machine interface for the agonist-antagonist system with two pairs of pneumatic artificial muscles (PAMs) that replicates the human elbow-joint system. We introduce the novel concepts of agonist-antagonist muscle-pair ratio (A-A ratio) and agonist-antagonist muscle-pair activity (A-A activity) to link the human muscle system to the PAM system, and we propose a linear control method translating the equilibrium point of human muscle system into that of PAM system. The human-robot experiment demonstrates the validity of the proposed method.