Prediction of Human Voluntary Torques Based on Collaborative Neuromusculoskeletal Modeling and Adaptive Learning

Surface Electromyography (sEMG) based human-robot interaction has been widely studied, where prediction of human voluntary torques is one of the key issues that have not been well addressed. In this article, a torque prediction method based on collaborative neuromusculoskeletal modeling and adaptive learning, is proposed to overcome the limitation of existing methods. First, an sEMG-torque model is designed in comprehensive consideration of the previous research results, the requirement for subject-specific adjustment and the coupling between the muscle or muscle-tendon length and the adjacent joint angles, where the latter two factors have rarely been considered in the literature. Then, by combining the advantages of the stochastic particle swarm optimization and conjugate gradient algorithms, a collaborative optimization method is designed to calibrate simultaneously the undetermined parameters. Moreover, an adaptive learning method based on Gaussian process regression is proposed to learn and predict the estimation errors in real time, by which it is supposed that the torque prediction accuracy can be improved efficiently. Finally, experiments were carried out to validate the performance of the proposed method.