An improvement of robot stiffness-adaptive skill primitive generalization using the surface electromyography in human–robot collaboration

Abstract

Learning from Demonstration in robotics has proved its efficiency in robot skill learning. The generalization goals of most skill expression models in real scenarios are specified by humans or associated with other perceptual data. Our proposed framework using the Probabilistic Movement Primitives (ProMPs) modeling to resolve the shortcomings of the previous research works; the coupling between stiffness and motion is inherently established in a single model. Such a framework can request a small amount of incomplete observation data to infer the entire skill primitive. It can be used as an intuitive generalization command sending tool to achieve collaboration between humans and robots with human-like stiffness modulation strategies on either side. Experiments (human–robot hand-over, object matching, pick-and-place) were conducted to prove the effectiveness of the work. Myo armband and Leap motion camera are used as surface electromyography (sEMG) signal and motion capture sensors respective in the experiments. Also, the experiments show that the proposed framework strengthened the ability to distinguish actions with similar movements under observation noise by introducing the sEMG signal into the ProMP model. The usage of the mixture model brings possibilities in achieving automation of multiple collaborative tasks.