Abstract
Exoskeletons offer great facilities to the elderly and disabled people with respect to extending their moving ranges and reacting to certain physical activities. Electromyogram (EMG) signals, which are derived from the neuromuscular system, provide an important access to the human-robot interface. On one hand, EMG signals can be used for real-time estimation of the motion intention of human body, e.g., the current joint angle status. On the other hand, however, the process of the mass EMG data, which are captured instantaneously from skin surface, challenges the state-of-the-art technology. Because its non-stationary and randomness, it is difficult to extract the valuable and stable features from the raw EMG signals. This paper investigates into the learning process of high dimensional EMG signals with a hierarchical mechanism that projects the original data into a lower feature space to achieve a local refined mapping from the EMG signals to the motion states of the human body. This hierarchically projected regression algorithm constructs incrementally a tree-based knowledge library, whose components represent local regression models. The components will be retrieved online efficiently and contribute to the estimation of the motion states. A great number of experiments are carried out to evaluate the accuracy of this novel algorithm.
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under grant 61035005 and 61075087, Hubei Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China under grant 2010CDA005, Hubei Provincial Education Department Foundation of China under grant no. Q20111105, Natural Science Foundation of Liaoning Province. The authors owe many thanks to Qichuan Ding, Weiran Cao and Anbin Xiong for valuable discussions. Special thanks go to Cheng Chen who helps much about the experiments platform of this study.
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Chen, Y., Zhao, X. & Han, J. Hierarchical projection regression for online estimation of elbow joint angle using EMG signals. Neural Comput & Applic 23, 1129–1138 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00521-012-1045-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00521-012-1045-8