Artificial Human Arm Driven by EMG Signal

Robot arms are versatile tools found in a wide range of applications. While the user moves his arm, (EMG) activity is recorded from selected muscles, using surface EMG electrodes. By a decoding procedure the muscular activity is transformed to kinematic variables that are used to control the robot arm. EMG signals have been used as control signals for robotics devices in the past. EMG signals, which are measured at the skin surface, are the electrical manifestations of the activity of muscles. It provides an important access to the human neuromuscular system. It has been well recognized as an effective tool to generate control commands for prosthetic devices and human-assisting manipulators. Up to the present, a number of EMG-based human interfaces have been proposed as a means for elderly people and the disabled to control powered prosthetic limbs, wheelchairs, teleoperated robots, and so on. The core part of these human–robot interfaces is a pattern classification process, where motions or intentions of motions are classified according to features extracted from EMG signals. Commands for device control are then generated from the classified motions (Bu et al., 2009).