Stiffness Estimation and Intention Detection for Human-Robot Collaboration

In this paper, we propose a stiffness estimation and intention detection method for human-robot collaboration. The human arm endpoint stiffness can be obtained according to the muscle activation levels of the upper arm and the human arm configurations. The estimated endpoint stiffness of human arm is matching to the robot arm joint stiffness through an appropriate mapping. The motion intention of human arm is detected based on the wrist configuration which is recognized by a Myo armband attached at the forearm of the operator. In order to reduce the time of feature engineering to ensure the performance of real-time collaboration, the wrist configuration recognition is realised based on the neural learning algorithm. The sEMG of the human forearm is directly fed into the neural network after processing by filters and sliding windows. The force sensor at the end of the robot arm is embedded in the feedback loop to make the robot arm better adapted to the operator's movement. The results of experiments performed on Baxter robot platform illustrate a good performance and verifies the proposed method.