A Vision-Driven Collaborative Robotic Grasping System Tele-Operated by Surface Electromyography.

Journal: Sensors (Basel, Switzerland)
Published Date:

Abstract

This paper presents a system that combines computer vision and surface electromyography techniques to perform grasping tasks with a robotic hand. In order to achieve a reliable grasping action, the vision-driven system is used to compute pre-grasping poses of the robotic system based on the analysis of tridimensional object features. Then, the human operator can correct the pre-grasping pose of the robot using surface electromyographic signals from the forearm during wrist flexion and extension. Weak wrist flexions and extensions allow a fine adjustment of the robotic system to grasp the object and finally, when the operator considers that the grasping position is optimal, a strong flexion is performed to initiate the grasping of the object. The system has been tested with several subjects to check its performance showing a grasping accuracy of around 95% of the attempted grasps which increases in more than a 13% the grasping accuracy of previous experiments in which electromyographic control was not implemented.

Authors

  • Andrés Úbeda
    Department of Physics, System Engineering and Signal Theory, University of Alicante, 03690 Alicante, Spain. andres.ubeda@ua.es.
  • Brayan S Zapata-Impata
  • Santiago T Puente
    Department of Physics, System Engineering and Signal Theory, University of Alicante, 03690 Alicante, Spain. santiago.puente@ua.es.
  • Pablo Gil
    Department of Physics, System Engineering and Signal Theory, University of Alicante, 03690 Alicante, Spain. pablo.gil@ua.es.
  • Francisco Candelas
    Department of Physics, System Engineering and Signal Theory, University of Alicante, 03690 Alicante, Spain. Francisco.Candelas@ua.es.
  • Fernando Torres
    Department of Physics, System Engineering and Signal Theory, University of Alicante, 03690 Alicante, Spain. fernando.torres@ua.es.