Channel Synergy-based Human-Robot Interface for a Lower Limb Walking Assistance Exoskeleton.

Abstract

The human-robot interface (HRI) based on surface electromyography(sEMG) can realize the natural interaction between human and robot. It has been widely used in exoskeleton robots recently to help predict the wearer's movement. The sEMG signal of the paraplegic patients' lower limbs is weak. How to achieve accurate prediction of the lower limb movement of patients with paraplegia has always been the focus of attention in the field of HRI. Few studies have explored the possibility of using upper limb sEMG signals to predict lower limb movement. In addition, most HRIs do not consider the contribution and synergy of sEMG signal channels. This paper proposes a human-exoskeleton interface based on upper limb sEMG signals to predict lower limb movements of paraplegic patients. The interface constructs a channel synergy-based network (MCSNet) to extract the contribution and synergy of different feature channels. An sEMG data acquisition experiment is designed to verify the effectiveness of MCSNet. The experimental results show that our method has a good movement prediction performance in both within-subject and cross-subject situations, reaching an accuracy of 94.51% and 80.75% respectively.