Abstract
An essential tremor is one of the undesired involuntary motions. If the essential tremor occurs in the arm, the person may not be able to achieve the target task properly because the human performs various sensitive tasks with certain tools. In a power-assist robot which is activated based on electromyogram (EMG) signals, the EMG signals are used to estimate the user's motion intention. Since the EMG signal reflects the muscle activity level, the EMG signal is generated not only when a voluntary motion occurs but also when an essential tremor occurs. Therefore, the essential tremor might be misunderstood as the user's motion intention in the EMG-based power-assist robot. In this paper, a tremor suppression control method with an upper-limb power-assist robot is proposed. In the proposed method, the vibrations of the hand and the tip of the tool are suppressed. The validity of the proposed method was verified by the experiments.
