Towards online myoelectric control based on muscle synergies-to-force mapping for robotic applications

How Many Muscles? Optimal Muscles Set Search for Optimizing Myocontrol Performance

“…Moreover, no strong differences have been found between "Pose-Shared" and "Pose-Related" synergies, with Shared synergies slightly outperforming the Related ones. In a previous work, with a larger workspace and a similar setup, the ability of "Pose-Related" synergies to reconstruct the initial EMG dataset was higher than "Pose-Shared" ones (Camardella et al, 2020a). This discrepancy in results may confirm the ability of "Pose-Related" synergies to better explain datasets that include limb poses that are very different, since synergies are extracted independently on each pose and clustered together.…”

“…In this instance "Pose-Related" seemed to better trace upper limb features on different workspace sites, when using a full muscle set, as well as to better estimate the force at the hand. In another work (Camardella et al, 2020a), "Pose-Related" synergies were used in a synergy-based myo-control during an online virtual session, suggesting the feasibility of such method in estimating the hand force in real-time. In this study, the coherence of "Pose-Shared" and "Pose-Related" synergies have been investigated in the case of a reduced muscle set, under similar protocol and signal processing conditions.…”

“…Muscle synergies have applications in a variety of fields, for example clinical assessments (Cheung et al, 2012;Roh et al, 2015) and control in robotics (Jiang et al, 2009;Berger and d'Avella, 2014): in the latter context, synergy-based myo-control was designed to exploit muscle activation patterns during task-related movements, reflecting the concept of CNS motor control. Synergy-based myo-controls have been tested in the hand force or articulation torques prediction, with linear-regression models, in a fixed (Berger and d'Avella, 2014) or multiple configurations of the limb (Buongiorno et al, 2017;Camardella et al, 2020a) with different synergies extraction algorithms. Most of the experiments in the literature exploited either isometric (in a virtual environment) or dynamic reaching tasks.…”

Human-Robot Interface to Operate Robotic Systems via Muscle Synergy-Based Kinodynamic Information Transfer

“…where α is a positive constant. We note that similar approaches can also be found in [11], [12]. Lastly, the vector flow of the human operator hand's jointand-skeleton data, which can be obtained by RGB-d camera, is directly used for position command.…”

“…The interpretation of muscle synergy also gives us an information about the direction and magnitude of limb movement. Berger and d'Avella presented a method to translate a muscle synergy into a force in two dimensional Cartesian space [4], and Camardella et al proposed an approach to map a muscle synergy onto a force [11]. Chen et al showed that the activation curve of a muscle synergy can be used to calculate a force generated by a hand [12].…”