Plug-and-Play Gesture Control Using Muscle and Motion Sensors

As the capacity for machines to extend human capabilities continues to grow, the communication channels used must also expand. Allowing machines to interpret nonverbal commands such as gestures can help make interactions more similar to interactions with another person. Yet to be pervasive and effective in realistic scenarios, such interfaces should not require significant sensing infrastructure or per-user setup time. The presented work takes a step towards these goals by using wearable muscle and motion sensors to detect gestures without dedicated calibration or training procedures. An algorithm is presented for clustering unlabeled streaming data in real time, and it is applied to adaptively thresholding muscle and motion signals acquired via electromyography (EMG) and an inertial measurement unit (IMU). This enables plug-and-play online detection of arm stiffening, fist clenching, rotation gestures, and forearm activation. It also augments a neural network pipeline, trained only on strategically chosen training data from previous users, to detect left, right, up, and down gestures. Together, these pipelines offer a plug-and-play gesture vocabulary suitable for remotely controlling a robot. Experiments with 6 subjects evaluate classifier performance and interface efficacy. Classifiers correctly identified 97.6% of 1,200 cued gestures, and a drone correctly responded to 81.6% of 1,535 unstructured gestures as subjects remotely controlled it through target hoops during 119 minutes of total flight time.