EMG-Based Control for Lower-Limb Power-Assist Exoskeletons

Power-Assist for lower-limb is expected by many physically weak persons to assist their daily activities. It is important for the power-assist robots that the assist motion is generated based on user's motion intention. This paper presents a muscle-model-oriented EMG-based (electromyogram-based) control method to activate a lower-limb power-assist robot according to the user's motion intention since the EMG directly reflects the user's muscle activities. In the proposed method, a matrix which expresses the relationship between the muscle activities and the generating joint torque is applied to estimate the user's motion intention in real-time. The effectiveness of the proposed control method was evaluated by performing experiments.