Active physical human-exoskeleton interaction based on motion intention adaptive recognition and synchronous tracking

Active physical human–exoskeleton interaction has been widely studied. However, the challenges of human motion intention recognition and synchronous tracking have not been well-addressed. In this article, a motion intention recognition method based on biophysical information fusion and adaptive learning was proposed to overcome the limitations of existing approaches. First, a lower-limb joint angle prediction model was developed by integrating surface electromyography (sEMG), historical joint angles and centers of gravity. The convolutional neural network, Mamba network, and multilayer perceptron network were used respectively for feature extraction, information fusion, and joint angle prediction. Second, an online adaptive method for the angle prediction model was designed based on a style transfer mapping technique to address the issue of recognition accuracy decline. In this method, the new sEMG features were mapped into the initial feature space, by which the prediction model can maintain the predictive performance during long-term implementation. Furthermore, a real-time control method for the exoskeleton synchronous tracking was given based on the predicted angles. Finally, the feasibility of the proposed methods was validated through the offline and online experiments.