1A1-D06 A Development of power assist system with EMG and force sensor

Recently, the aging problem is attracting great attention in society of Japan. One of the important technologies to overcome this problem is a development of power assist system which is able to assist the elder or disabled person in various situations. In the previous works, a force sensor was mainly adopted as the interface between machine and human operator. In addition, the EMG sensor is expected to play an important role in the man-machine interface since it can detect the human intention earlier than the force sensor. This paper presents a new power assist system wherein both of the EMG and force sensors are exploited and appropriately switched according to the operating situation. The usefulness of the proposed scheme is demonstrated through some experiments.