Preliminary research of surface electromyogram (sEMG) signal analysis for robotic arm control

摘要

Human-robot interactions have gained popularity in the recent past, particularly in the advent and revolution of industry 4.0 era. There are still open research issues to be addressed, e.g., human-machine interaction, especially in robotic operation using bio-signal. This paper presents surface electromyography (sEMG) signal analysis of the motion of upper limb muscles to control the robotic arm. The objective is to use as few EMG channels to estimate joint angles for application in a robotic arm. The overall target is how this information can be applied to a robot control scheme. Three motions are proposed based on the 2 degrees of freedom (DOF) between joint elbow and shoulder. Three sEMG channel signal is captured using a DAQ unit comprising of pre-amplifier and NI USB 6008 and a laptop running LabVIEW software. The analysis is conducted using Matlab software. The result indicates that the sEMG from three muscles of the upper limb gives useful information and the performance of the sEMG synergy-based model has a good prospect for the controlling robot arm.