Muscle force is an important physiological parameter of the human body. Accurate estimation of the muscle force can improve the stability and flexibility of lower limb joint auxiliary equipment. Nevertheless, the existing force estimation methods can neither satisfy the accuracy requirement nor ensure the validity of estimation results. It is a very challenging task that needs to be solved. Among many optimization algorithms, gray wolf optimization (GWO) is widely used to find the optimal parameters of the regression model because of its superior optimization ability. Due to the traditional GWO being prone to fall into local optimum, a new nonlinear convergence factor and a new position update strategy are employed to balance local and global search capability. In this paper, an improved gray wolf optimization (IGWO) algorithm to optimize the support vector regression (SVR) is developed to estimate knee joint extension force accurately and timely. Firstly, mechanomyography (MMG) of the lower limb is measured by acceleration sensors during leg isometric muscle contractions extension training. Secondly, root mean square (RMS), mean absolute value (MAV), zero crossing (ZC), mean power frequency (MPF), and sample entropy (SE) of the MMG are extracted to construct feature sets as candidate data sets for regression analysis. Lastly, the features are fed into IGWO-SVR for further training. Experiments demonstrate that the IGWO-SVR provides the best performance indexes in the estimation of knee joint extension force in terms of RMSE, MAPE, and R compared with the other state-of-art models. These results are expected to become the most effective as guidance for rehabilitation training, muscle disease diagnosis, and health evaluation.

During lower-extremity rehabilitation training, muscle activity status needs to be monitored in real time to adjust the assisted force appropriately, but it is a challenging task to obtain muscle force noninvasively. Mechanomyography (MMG) signals offer unparalleled advantages over sEMG, reflecting the intention of human movement while being noninvasive. Therefore, in this paper, based on MMG, a combined scheme of gray relational analysis (GRA) and support vector regression optimized by an improved cuckoo search algorithm (ICS-SVR) is proposed to estimate the knee joint extension force. Firstly, the features reflecting muscle activity comprehensively, such as time-domain features, frequency-domain features, time–frequency-domain features, and nonlinear dynamics features, were extracted from MMG signals, and the relational degree was calculated using the GRA method to obtain the correlation features with high relatedness to the knee joint extension force sequence. Then, a combination of correlated features with high relational degree was input into the designed ICS-SVR model for muscle force estimation. The experimental results show that the evaluation indices of the knee joint extension force estimation obtained by the combined scheme of GRA and ICS-SVR were superior to other regression models and could estimate the muscle force with higher estimation accuracy. It is further demonstrated that the proposed scheme can meet the need of muscle force estimation required for rehabilitation devices, powered prostheses, etc.

It is of great significance to estimate the interaction force of upper limbs accurately for improving the control performance of human–computer interaction. However, due to the randomness of the input biological signals and the influence of environmental interference, the interaction force is difficult to estimate using the current methods. Therefore, based on the advantages of the Residual Network (ResNet) and Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory Network (BiLSTM) model, this paper proposes an end-to-end regression model that integrates ResNet and BiLSTM with an attention mechanism. This model is more suitable for time series sEMG signals. Moreover, it improves the feature extraction ability of the signal and improves the accuracy of interaction force estimation. Experimental results show that this method can automatically extract effective features without professional knowledge. In addition, our method is superior to existing methods in estimation accuracy and generalization ability.

The robot’s arm trajectory can be used to improve the quality of the robot work. The current method utilizes the searching ability of the Alopex algorithm to perform a rough search of the robot’s path of action to achieve the trajectory planning of its arm, but the planning efficiency is low. To this end, this paper uses chaos control to plan the robot arm trajectory. Based on the description of the robot arm trajectory planning, the robotic arm trajectory planning is completed by using the obstacle to the intersection time, probability prediction, motion planning strategy and real-time obstacle avoidance. Experiments show that this method can carry on the efficient planning to the robot arm trajectory.

Rapid and accurate prediction of interaction force is an effective way to enhance the compliant control performance. However, whether individual muscles or a combination of muscles is more suitable for interaction force prediction under different contraction tasks is of great importance in the compliant control of the wearable assisted robot. In this article, a novel algorithm that is based on sEMG and KPCA-DRSN is proposed to explore the relationship between interaction force prediction and sEMG signals. Furthermore, the contribution of each muscle to the interaction force is assessed based on the predicted results. First of all, the experimental platform for obtaining the sEMG is described. Then, the raw sEMG signal of different muscles is collected from the upper arm during different contractions. Meanwhile, the output force is collected by the force sensor. The Kernel Principal Component Analysis (KPCA) method is adopted to remove the invalid components of the raw sEMG signal. After that, the processed sequence is fed into the Deep Residual Shrinkage Network (DRSN) to predict the interaction force. Finally, based on the prediction results, the contribution of each sEMG signal from different muscles to the interaction force is evaluated by the mean impact value (MIV) indicator. The experimental results demonstrate that our methods can automatically extract the valid features of sEMG signal and provided fast and efficient prediction. In addition, the single muscle with the largest MIV index could predict the interaction force faster and more accurately than the muscle combination in different contraction tasks. The finding of our research provides a solid evidence base for the compliant control of the wearable robot.