Single muscle site sEMG interface for assistive grasping

Abstract

We present a joint demonstration between the Robotics, Autonomous Systems, and Controls Laboratory (RASCAL) at UC Davis and the Columbia University Robotics Group, wherein a human-in-the-loop robotic grasping platform in the Columbia lab (New York, NY) is controlled to select and grasp an object by a C3-C4 spinal cord injury (SCI) subject in the UC Davis lab (Davis, CA) using a new single-signal, multi-degree-of-freedom surface electromyography (sEMG) human-robot interface. The grasping system breaks the grasping task into a multi-stage pipeline that can be navigated with only a few inputs. It integrates pre-planned grasps with on-line grasp planning capability and an object recognition and target selection system capable of handling multi-object scenes with moderate occlusion. Previous work performed in the RASCAL lab demonstrated that by continuously modulating the power in two individual bands in the frequency spectrum of a single sEMG signal, users were able to control a cursor in 2D for cursor to target tasks. Using this paradigm, four targets were presented in order for the subject to command the multi-stage grasping pipeline. We demonstrate that using this system, operators are able to grasp objects in a remote location using a robotic grasping platform.