EMG-based teleoperation and manipulation with the DLR LWR-III

In this paper we describe and practically demonstrate a robotic arm/hand system that is controlled in real-time in 6D Cartesian space through measured human muscular activity. The soft-robotics control architecture of the robotic system ensures safe physical human robot interaction as well as stable behaviour while operating in an unstructured environment. Muscular control is realised via surface electromyography, a non-invasive and simple way to gather human muscular activity from the skin. A standard supervised machine learning system is used to create a map from muscle activity to hand position, orientation and grasping force which then can be evaluated in real time - the existence of such a map is guaranteed by gravity compensation and low-speed movement. No kinematic or dynamic model of the human arm is necessary, which makes the system quickly adaptable to anyone. Numerical validation shows that the system achieves good movement precision. Live evaluation and demonstration of the system during a robotic trade fair is reported and confirms the validity of the approach, which has potential applications in muscle-disorder rehabilitation or in teleoperation where a close-range, safe master/slave interaction is required, and/or when optical/magnetic position tracking cannot be enforced.