Compliance Control of Slave Manipulator Using EMG Signal for Telemanipulation

Telemanipulation systems have been widely utilized in industrial, surgical, educational, and even military fields. One of the important issues is that when a robot interacts with environment or objects, it can damage the robot itself or the objects due to hard contact. To address this problem, we propose a novel compliance control of a slave robot using the electromyography (EMG) signal, which is measured by the sensors attached onto the master operator's arm. The EMG signal is used since it is easy to process and it provides humans with an intuitive capability to perform the operational work. Furthermore, it has been proved that the EMG signal is useful in the control of the stiffness of the slave robot. This research identifies the muscle that is the best suitable to a precision-grip operation, and a series of experiments were performed. A compliance control algorithm with a variable stiffness of a slave robot is proposed, where the stiffness is changed based on the EMG signal, and it is confirmed by a series of experiments using a two-channel force/position teleoperation architecture.