EMG-Based Control of a Robot Arm Using Low-Dimensional Embeddings

As robots come closer to humans, an efficient human-robot-control interface is an utmost necessity. In this paper, electromyographic (EMG) signals from muscles of the human upper limb are used as the control interface between the user and a robot arm. A mathematical model is trained to decode upper limb motion from EMG recordings, using a dimensionality-reduction technique that represents muscle synergies and motion primitives. It is shown that a 2-D embedding of muscle activations can be decoded to a continuous profile of arm motion representation in the 3-D Cartesian space, embedded in a 2-D space. The system is used for the continuous control of a robot arm, using only EMG signals from the upper limb. The accuracy of the method is assessed through real-time experiments, including random arm motions.