MATEC Web of Conferences 309, 04007 (2020) https://doi.org/10.
1051/matecconf/202030 904007
CSCNS2019
Robot arm control method using forearm EMG
signals
Minjie Chen1,*, and Honghai Liu2
1Zhejiang University of Technology, Hangzhou, China
2Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China
Keywords: Surface EMG signal, SVM, Pattern recognition, Robot arm.
Abstract. With the continuous improvement of control technology and the
continuous improvement of people's living standards, the needs of disabled
people for high-quality prosthetics have become increasingly strong. A
control method of robotic arm based on surface electromyography signal
(sEMG) of forearm is proposed. Firstly, the 16-channel EMG data of the
forearm is obtained via the multi-channel EMG acquisition instrument and
the electrode cuff as input signals, the features are extracted, then the
gestures are classified and identified by the support-vector machine (SVM)
algorithm, and the signals are finally transmitted to the robotic arm, so that
people can teleoperate the robotic arm via sEMG signals in real time. Reduce
the number of channels to lower the cost while ensuring a high and usable
recognition rate. Experiments were performed by collecting EMG signals
from the forearm surface of eight healthy volunteers. The experimental
results show that the system's overall gesture recognition accuracy rate can
reach up to 90%, and the system responds fast, laying a good foundation for
manipulating artificial limbs in the future.
1 Introduction
In the past few decades, robotics has developed unprecedentedly and is widely used in
assisted rehabilitation for the disabled. With the advancement of control technology, the
accuracy of the prosthesis has also been greatly improved. There are many ways to control
prostheses, and a variety of human physiological signals can be used, such as trajectory
tracking [1], EEG [2, 3], EOG [2, 3], EMG [3, 4,5]. Among them, the EMG signal has the
characteristics of simple acquisition and direct correlation with the contraction and relaxation
of muscle fibers, so it is widely used in clinical medicine, rehabilitation medicine, artificial
intelligence and other aspects [6].
Surface electromyography signal (sEMG) is a bioelectrical signal generated by the
neuromuscular activity recorded on the surface of human skeletal muscle through electrodes
[7]. Specifically, the sEMG signal reflects the sum of the action potentials released during
the muscle fiber activity near the recording electrode. The sEMG signal is non-stationary and
© The Authors, published by EDP Sciences. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative
Commons Attribution License 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
MATEC Web of Conferences 309, 04007 (2020) https://doi.org/10.1051/matecconf/202030 904007
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easily contaminated by various factors, including not only the inherent noise of the device,
environmental noise and motion artifacts, but also physiological anatomical features, which
make it difficult to control the prosthesis. Therefore, there is a need to consider the use of
advanced signal processing methods to handle the variability of sEMG signals. The good
interactive experience of sEMG signals has a broad application prospect in the field of
prosthetic control. Therefore, it is natural and intuitive for amputees to control prosthetic
hands with sEMG. Regrettably, however, most commercial prosthetic hands are still very
low in functionality and continue to function as decorative fake hands in life. Therefore,
researchers are committed to researching new types of multifunctional human prosthetic
hands, such as Southampton-REMEDI Hand [8], RTR 2 [9], MANUS [10], Karlsruhe Hand
[11] and so on.
In view of the high cost of commercial prosthetic hand control, inflexible operation and
poor practicality [12], this paper designs a set of real-time control system of manipulator
based on myoelectric signal of forearm surface. The forearm surface EMG signals are
extracted for identification and classification, and the coding forms control commands. The
robot receives control commands through UDP, thereby realizing real-time interaction
between humans and robots.
2 Method
2.1 Experimental design
The whole system needs to connect the myoelectric acquisition device with the robot. The
surface electromyography signal can be regarded as the control source. The control scheme
is mainly composed of four parts: EMG signal acquisition, preprocessing and feature
extraction, motion classification, and action. carried out. Specifically, the subject first
acquired the 16-channel myoelectric data of the arm through a multi-channel
electromyography instrument and an electrode cuff (including 7 different gestures, as shown
in Figure 1 below, each action is maintained for 10 s during acquisition). Time), the data is
stored locally, and the corresponding four EMG features are extracted, and then the human
gesture electromyography model is trained by the classical machine learning algorithm (this
experiment uses the SVM classifier). Then, after the subject rests for 10 minutes (Note: the
electrode sleeve cannot be untied to prevent the electrode displacement from shifting), the
above 8 gestures are randomly performed, and the corresponding surface EMG data is
recorded in real time and passed the trained model. Perform real-time gesture classification.
Then, the classified gesture result is transmitted to the machine control terminal through the
UDP method. Finally, according to the mapping relationship between each gesture action and
the arm movement (the seven groups of actions correspond to upper, lower, left, right, front,
rear, and grab respectively), the corresponding motor controller commands are converted to
drive the robot arm to move, thereby achieving The effect of the movement of the robot arm
is controlled by the myoelectric signal. The entire system control framework is shown in
Figure 2.
2.2 Apparatus
The equipment used in this article is an Elonxi multi-channel EMG acquisition device
developed by Hangzhou Jiaopu Technology Co., Ltd. It mainly includes an EMG acquisition
device and an electrode sleeve, as shown in Figure 3 below. Surface EMG signals.
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Fig. 1. 7 groups of gestures: (1) wrist radial deviation(WRD); (2) wrist ulnar deviation(WUD); (3)
wrist eversion(WEV); (4) wrist inversion(WI); (5) wrist extension(WE); (6) wrist flexsion(WF); (7)
hand close(HC).
Fig. 2. Robot control software development framework based on EMG signal.
The EMG acquisition instrument uses a sampling frequency of 1kHz and a 12-bit ADC
resolution. The sEMG data obtained by the acquisition module is packaged and sent to the
PC through two Bluetooth modules for analysis and processing. The device is powered by a
3.3V rechargeable lithium battery and can last up to 10 hours in a single use. In addition,
since the surface EMG signal is an unstable signal and is easily susceptible to interference
from the external environment, in order to be able to extract a clean signal from the surface
of the human body, this device focuses on the source and characteristics of the noise. Five-
element sEMG amplifier: passive low-pass filter, differential amplifier, band-pass filter,
notch filter, and main amplifier. The passive low-pass filter is placed before the differential
amplifier to suppress high-frequency noise. A differential amplifier having a high input
impedance and a high common-mode rejection ratio (CMRR) is used as the first-stage
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amplifier. The band-pass filter can remove low-frequency motion artifacts and high-
frequency white noise that exceed the sEMG frequency range (20Hz to 500Hz) (although the
frequency range of the EMG signal depends to some extent on the type of electrode, the pass
range is about 20Hz Bandpass filters up to 500Hz are widely accepted for filtering sEMG
signals). In addition, a notch filter with a center frequency of 50 Hz is set to suppress the
power line noise penetrating into the myoelectric signal through capacitive coupling, reduce
negative effects and improve the robustness of the system. Finally, the main amplifier is used
to further amplify the sEMG signal and adjust it to a voltage range suitable for analog-to-
digital conversion. Through this part of the design, the EMG data of each channel can keep
its noise less than 1μV, so as to achieve a good acquisition effect.
Fig. 3. Elonxi EMG collecting device.
This experiment mainly uses the multi-channel acquisition mode, in which the electrode
sleeve [13] is used, as shown in Figure 4 below. A dry electrode is used in the cuff to capture
the sEMG signal. The dry electrode does not need to be used with a conductive paste, and is
mainly used to measure biopotential signals. The electrode material that comes into contact
with the skin is nickel-free metal, which was originally designed from a snap button. The
entire cuff is built with 18 electrodes. The diameter of each electrode is 25mm, the electrode
spacing is 30mm horizontally and 16mm vertically. The whole is arranged in a zigzag pattern.
A total of 16 channels of EMG data can be collected. (The remaining two electrodes are bias
electrodes)
Fig. 4. Electrode sleeve and electrode distribution.
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2.3 Feature extraction
The surface electromyography signal is rich in information. It is the time and space
comprehensive result of the action potentials of multiple muscles obtained by surface
electrodes on the skin surface [14]. Feature extraction is to use various methods to extract
information that is valuable for research from the original EMG signals, and filter out some
of the interference factors and useless information. In order to improve the response speed of
the system and ensure the real-time operation of the system, we choose time-domain features
with less computation and rapid acquisition as the information metric [15].
The five traditional EMG features selected in this experiment are as follows:
Root mean square (RMS) records the amplitude of the surface EMG signal and reflects
the degree of contraction of each muscle to a certain extent.
1
𝑅𝑀𝑆 = √ ∑𝑁
𝑖=1 𝑥𝑖
2 (1)
𝑁
where N is the length of the sliding window and x_i is the i-th sample point
2. Form Waveform Length (WL) is the sum of the accumulated length of the recorded
EMG signal waveform, that is, the sum of the difference between two adjacent amplitude
values. The expression is as follows:
𝑊𝐿 = ∑𝑁−1
𝑖=1 |𝑥𝑖+1 − 𝑥𝑖 | (2)
3. Zero Crossing (ZC) records the number of times the amplitude of the EMG signal
crosses zero, which is related to the frequency of the signal. It is essentially a statistical
analysis of the time domain characteristics of its frequency information and can reflect
changes in different frequency components. In order to avoid low voltage fluctuations or
background noise, threshold conditions need to be defined. The calculation definition can be
expressed as:
𝑍𝐶 = ∑𝑁−1
𝑖=1 𝑠𝑔𝑛(−𝑥𝑖 𝑥𝑖+1 ) (3)
where
1 𝑥>𝜀
𝑠𝑔𝑛(𝑥) = { (4)
0 𝑥≤𝜀
ε is a threshold to avoid low-level noise.
4. Mean Frequency (MNF) is also a frequency domain feature. It calculates the ratio of
the sum of the product of the power spectrum and the frequency to the sum of the spectrum
strengths. The expression is as follows:
∑𝑀
𝑗=1 𝑓𝑗 𝑝𝑗
𝑀𝑁𝐹 = ∑𝑀
(5)
𝑗=1 𝑝𝑗
Among them, f_j represents the frequency spectrum in the frequency band, p_j represents
the power spectrum intensity in the frequency band, and M is the length of the entire
frequency band.
6. Auto Regressive Coefficients (AR) can also be used as features of EMG signals. The
AR model is a linear, second-order moment stationary model. The EMG signal can be a linear
combination of the previous sampled signal and the white noise error term. It is defined as:
𝑝
𝑥𝑘 = ∑𝑖 𝑎𝑖 𝑥𝑘−𝑖 + 𝑒𝑘 (6)
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where p is the order of the AR model and a_i is a coefficient that is a feature of the myoelectric
signal.
2.4 Classification
In the current field of pattern recognition, support vector machine (SVM) is widely used. It
has the advantages of relatively complete theory, strong adaptability, global optimization,
short training time, and good generalization performance. Because the system requires a low
time delay to ensure the smoothness of the experimenter when manipulating the robotic arm,
this method is selected as the classifier. In addition, the accuracy of the SVM support vector
machine classifier is also superior to other machine learning algorithms in the field of EMG
gesture recognition. SVM support vector machines can process linearly inseparable data by
mapping data to higher dimensions and using radial basis functions (RBF). Specifically, we
use the SVM toolbox in Matlab (Mathworks Inc., Natick, USA). Function LibSVM to build
a classifier.
2.5 Robot
The experiment chose Baxter robot as the operation terminal, as shown in Figure 5 below.
Baxter is equipped with a ROS (Robot Operating System) -based software development kit
(SDK). The body integrates a variety of devices and sensors such as cameras, sonars, displays,
etc., and is a safe, economical and powerful platform.
Fig. 5. Baxter robot.
Baxter robot is a two-arm 7-axis robot with a structure similar to a human body, including
a head, two arms, a torso, and a base (two legs). A head position is equipped with a display
that can rotate, nod, and display rich expressions to interact with the operator. There is also
a camera above the display to observe the surrounding environment. There are 12 sonar
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sensors on the top of the head to detect the surrounding conditions and detect if people are
approaching to prevent the robotic arm from hurting people. A low-cost PC is built into the
Baxter's torso and the Baxter airborne control system Gentoo is installed. Each joint of the
Baxter robotic arm has a torque feedback system that can feedback the current torque value.
Baxter's software framework is built on ROS, and its SDK is distributed on airborne
computers and client computers. The on-board computer provides an independent ROS host
for node management. Any remote computer can connect and control Baxter through the
ROS API. The SDK of the Baxter on the client computer mainly provides function interfaces
for controlling the joint motor movement of the robot and other hardware devices, defines
the types of messages or services required for communication between the hardware, and
also provides some auxiliary tools for robot development.
3 Result and discussion
The content of this experiment is an experiment of grabbing a small object by a robot based
on the surface EMG signal, as shown in Figure 6 below. In order to verify the feasibility and
control effect of the system, we selected 2 subjects with healthy upper limbs (the
corresponding serial numbers are S1 and S2) for experiments. Before that, he had not
received any operation training based on EMG signal recognition.
Fig. 6. The subject controls the robotic arm to grasp small pieces through the EMG signal.
According to the previous experimental results, we can get the number of optimized
channels (that is, reduced from 16 channels to 6 channels), and their numbers are: 1, 8, 9, 10,
15, 16; 4, 8, 9, 10, 12, 16. In order to verify the effect of its channel optimization in the
specific recognition scene, each subject performed 10 gestures for the 7 gesture actions in
Figure 1 and recorded the correct number of recognitions, during which the gesture order was
disrupted. In addition, record the time required to complete a grab operation (the starting
position of each grab) for different groups of channels.
Figures 7 to 10 show the visualization of different gestures during real-time EMG
acquisition in two different channel optimization scenarios. Among them, Figures 7 and 9
are the EMG data used for offline training classification models, including 7 gestures for a
total of 90 seconds. Figures 8 and 10 are two sets of gesture EMG signals randomly selected
during real-time acquisition. The middle part is a diagram of our EMG pattern. The
visualization of the EMG signal in amplitude mode only highlights the changes in the signal
in the time domain, which cannot reflect the spatial relationship between different EMG
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channels. The EMG pattern studies different EMG signals in a spatial domain. The
relationship between the channels, from which areas with strong muscle activity can be
identified, so that different gestures can be clearly distinguished.
Fig. 7. 6 channels of 7 kinds of gesture EMG signals.
Fig. 8. Two groups of gesture action EMG signals in real-time acquisition (wrist right turn, wrist
upper cut).
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Fig. 9. 6 channels 7 kinds of gestures EMG signal diagram 2.
Fig. 10. EMG signals of two groups of gestures (relaxation, undercut of the wrist) during real-time
acquisition.
Table 1 shows the average recognition results of the subjects for the seven gestures, and
the numbers represent the number of correct recognitions. Each subject repeats the
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experiment 3 times. The sequence of gestures in each experiment is random, but the total
number of times is 70, and each action is 10 times. Finally, the average of the results of the
experiments of the 2 subjects is filled in the table. It can be found from the table that using
the 16-channel EMG signals can basically recognize these 7 gestures, and the recognition
rate can reach 98.57%. When the number of channels is reduced to 6 channels, the recognition
rate slightly decreases, but it can also Reaching 88.57% and 90% respectively, maintaining
a high recognition level.
Table 1. Motion recognition results under different myoelectric channels.
Gesture WE WR WU
HC WE WF WI
Channel V D D
1, 8, 9, 10, 15, 16 8 9 9 9 10 8 9
4, 8, 9, 10, 12, 16 9 9 9 8 9 9 10
1-16 9 10 10 10 10 10 10
In addition, we also recorded the time required for each of the two subjects to complete a
grab operation using the three different channel numbers, and took the average value: 3
minutes and 44 seconds (1, 8, 9, 10, 15, 16), 3 minutes and 36 seconds (4, 8, 9, 10, 12, 16),
2 minutes and 55 seconds (channels 1-16). The results show that after optimizing the channel
and reducing the amount of data, the specific scene recognition operation can still be
completed well.
4 Conclusions
This study designed a manipulator control system based on forearm surface EMG signals.
The system has simple control method, good real-time performance and fast response. It
realizes the real-time interaction between human and robotic arm, which proves the
feasibility of using surface electromyography signals to control the robotic arm and control
external equipment for other physiological electrical signals in the future. Platforms and
references provided. However, because the EMG signal is easily affected by factors such as
muscle fatigue and sweating, the recognition results are unstable, and the operator needs to
maintain a posture for a long time to continue to exert force, which is poor in experience.
These factors hinder the superficial muscle-based Development of Electric Control Research.
In future research work, reducing the influence of external factors on EMG signals will be
the focus of work.
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