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Sunday, September 16, 2012

A Hybrid Motion Classification Approach for EMG-Based Human-Robot Interfaces Using Bayesian and Neural Networks


Nan Bu, Masaru Okamoto, Toshito Tsuji
IEEE Transactions on Robotics, Vol.25, No.3, June 2009
Summary
  The paper discusses the usage of electromyogram (EMG) signals, classified simultaneously by probabilistic neural networks, for human motion prediction in a human-robot cooperation environment. EMG signals are electrical manifestations of the activity muscles measured at the skin surface and in the literature difference application are described are done, significant is Tsuju et. Al, who introduce an Entropy based decision rule to reduce misclassifications, the system imposes that when entropy exceeds a certain value, then the motion decision rule must suspend the judgment. The paper proposes a Bayesian Network for motion prediction, it presents the following advantages: 1) Being a probabilistic expression, it is good in dealing with uncertainty, which is typical of human behavior decision; 2) The network structure can be created from data or devised by hand; 3) the conditional probability tables, which compose the parameters of the problem, can be obtained from the data itself. Unlike the usage of Petri Nets (Fukuda et. al), the usage of Bayesian Networks doesn’t need predefined detailed sequences, but conditional probabilities extracted from the data.
·       Model
The Bayesian Network is a graphical notation that encodes conditional dependence relationships among a set of events, it is dependent on nodes variables (V), arcs between nodes (A) and probabilities associated with each node. The model considers mc, motion at current step, mp, motion for previous step, lp, location of motion mp, hp, user’s hand position at previous step, P(mp), probability of motion, P(hp), probability of hand position at previous step, P(lp|hp), conditional probability of location of location at the previous step given the previous hand position, P(mc|mp,lp), conditional probability of the current motion with respect to motion and location information at previous step, this can be calculated by knowing the number of samples in a database as shown.
P(lp|hp) is a continuous probability distribution (due to the presence of hp, which is a continuous variable) and can be calculated through Bayes’ Law.
EMG signals are collected from a certain number of electrodes, they are rectifies, filtered by a second order Butterworth filter and digitized with a sampling frequency fs, in the end a feature vector x(t) is obtained and used as pattern to be classified by a probabilistic Neural Network (LLGMN – Log-linearized Gaussian mixture network), giving O(t), the posterior probability vector, as a final output. The amplitude of the EMG indicated the force information FEMG(t). The motion belief appears to be very important, it initializes the model with a value of 1/M, with M indicating the sample size, and later calculated as for P(mc|mp,lp). Motion decision is taking onlywhen the force FEMG(t) is more or equal than Fth, which is an indicative value for this purpose. Also the Entropy may be calculated and when is surpasses a certain fixed value Hd, the motions will be suspended. During motion a probability of motion is used to and is dependent on motion, output and a weight wm. The importance of wm is relevant to the fact that it introduces α as value which determines the influence in motion preditiction combination (the larger and the greater is the influence).
Key Concepts
EEG signals for robotic control, Bayesian Network for motion prediction
Key Results
An experiment on the system has proved the improvement of integrating BN in LLGMN, obtaining a statistically relevance reduction in misclassification. The model appears still to be improved, due mainly to the difficulty in human behavior prediction, but it definitely can provide, through BN, more robustness and reliabil

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