Search arXiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2107.13799

Mapping Human Muscle Force to Supernumerary Robotics Device for Overhead Task Assistance

Jianwen Luo·Sicong Liu·Chengyu Lin·Yong Zhou·Zixuan Fan·Zheng Wang·Chaoyang Song·H. Harry Asada·Chenglong Fu
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Supernumerary Robotics Device (SRD) is an ideal solution to provide robotic assistance in overhead manual manipulation. Since two arms are occupied for the overhead task, it is desired to have additional arms to assist us in achieving other subtasks such as supporting the far end of a long plate and pushing it upward to fit in the ceiling. In this study, a method that maps human muscle force to SRD for overhead task assistance is proposed. Our methodology is to utilize redundant DoFs such as the idle muscles in the leg to control the supporting force of the SRD. A sEMG device is worn on the operator's shank where muscle signals are measured, parsed, and transmitted to SRD for control. In the control aspect, we adopted stiffness control in the task space based on torque control at the joint level. We are motivated by the fact that humans can achieve daily manipulation merely through simple inherent compliance property in joint driven by muscles. We explore to estimate the force of some particular muscles in humans and control the SRD to imitate the behaviors of muscle and output supporting forces to accomplish the subtasks such as overhead supporting. The sEMG signals detected from human muscles are extracted, filtered, rectified, and parsed to estimate the muscle force. We use this force information as the intent of the operator for proper overhead supporting force. As one of the well-known compliance control methods, stiffness control is easy to achieve using a few of straightforward parameters such as stiffness and equilibrium point. Through tuning the stiffness and equilibrium point, the supporting force of SRD in task space can be easily controlled. The muscle force estimated by sEMG is mapped to the desired force in the task space of the SRD. The desired force is transferred into stiffness or equilibrium point to output the corresponding supporting force.

Explore related subjects

cs.RO

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Jianwen Luo, Sicong Liu, Chengyu Lin, Yong Zhou, Zixuan Fan, Zheng Wang, Chaoyang Song, H. Harry Asada, Chenglong Fu. 2021-08-31. Mapping Human Muscle Force to Supernumerary Robotics Device for Overhead Task Assistance. https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.13799

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Robotic Tele-Operation for Upper Aerodigestive Tract Microsurgery: System Design and Validation

Upper aerodigestive tract (UADT) treatments frequently employ transoral laser microsurgery (TLM) for procedures such as the removal of tumors or polyps. In TLM, a laser beam is used to cut target tissue, while forceps are employed to grasp, manipulate, and stabilize tissue within the UADT. Although TLM systems may rely on different technologies and interfaces, forceps manipulation is still predominantly performed manually, introducing limitations in ergonomics, precision, and controllability. This paper proposes a novel robotic system for tissue manipulation in UADT procedures, based on a novel end-effector designed for forceps control. The system is integrated within a teleoperation framework that employs a robotic manipulator with a programmed remote center of motion (RCM), enabling precise and constrained instrument motion while improving surgeon ergonomics. The proposed approach is validated through two experimental studies and a dedicated usability evaluation, demonstrating its effectiveness and suitability for UADT surgical applications.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

HERMES: A Holistic End-to-End Risk-Aware Multimodal Embodied System with Vision-Language Models for Long-Tail Autonomous Driving

End-to-end autonomous driving models increasingly benefit from large vision-language models for semantic understanding, yet safe and reliable planning under long-tail conditions remains challenging, particularly in mixed-traffic environments involving heterogeneous road users and rare safety-critical interactions. This paper proposes HERMES, a holistic risk-aware end-to-end multimodal driving framework that explicitly incorporates long-tail semantic knowledge into trajectory planning. HERMES employs a foundation-model-assisted annotation pipeline to construct structured Long-Tail Scene Context and Long-Tail Planning Context, capturing hazard-centric scene information, maneuver intent, and risk-aware planning guidance. A Tri-Modal Driving Module then integrates multi-view visual observations, historical ego-motion, and long-tail semantic instructions through intent- and risk-aware conditioning for trajectory generation. Extensive experiments on a large-scale real-world long-tail driving benchmark demonstrate consistent improvements over representative recent baselines in overall planning performance and across diverse safety-critical scenarios. Ablation studies further validate the effectiveness and complementary roles of the major components within HERMES.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

EgoPush: Egocentric Multi-Object Rearrangement for Mobile Robots via Constrained Teacher Observability

Humans rearrange objects in cluttered environments using egocentric perception, actively moving to keep task-relevant spatial cues in view. Mobile robots have not matched this: rearrangement is usually built on a global pose estimate or a map, which is exactly what a robot carrying one camera lacks, while pushing keeps changing the scene it would have to be built from. We present EgoPush, which pushes objects into anchor-relative formations from onboard RGB-D alone, with no global localization, external tracking, or map at deployment, and transfers zero-shot to a TurtleBot in controlled and visually cluttered scenes. What makes this learnable turns out to be a property of the teacher rather than of the student: three privileged teachers trained with identical rewards, architecture, and hyperparameters all exceed $98\%$ success, yet their distilled egocentric students reach $0\%$, $54.8\%$, and $87.3\%$, the only variable being the teacher's observation function. EgoPush therefore trains the teacher under egocentric observability constraints, restricting it to visibility-limited cues and revealing target references only when the anchor is centrally visible, so that its supervision is recoverable by a depth-based student distilled online. Making the teacher trainable in the first place needs two further pieces: a role-grouped object-centric interface shared by teacher and student, and stage-wise temporally decayed rewards for long-horizon credit assignment. Videos, the playable task, and code are available at https://ai4ce.github.io/EgoPush/.

cs.RO↗