Strength Capacity Estimation of Human Upper Limb in Human-Robot Interactions with Muscle Synergy Models

Abstract

Assist-as-needed approach is one of the main concepts to design physical human-robot interactions for assistive and rehabilitation robotics. One of the challenges in designing assist-as-needed devices is to determine the physical strength capacity of human musculoskeletal system without extensively conducting experiments to probe the capability envelopes. We present an estimation scheme of the strength capacity of the human upper limb using the muscle synergy model. The estimation scheme identifies the muscle synergy model parameters and then built on model using human-robot interaction experiments, the physical strength capacity is estimated. Experiments are presented to validate and demonstrate the performance of the estimation scheme.