  When a human performs a given specific task, it has been known that the
central nervous system controls modularized muscle group, which is called
muscle synergy. For human-robot interface design problem, therefore, the muscle
synergy can be utilized to reduce the dimensionality of control signal as well
as the complexity of classifying human posture and motion. In this paper, we
propose an approach to design a human-robot interface which enables a human
operator to transfer a kinodynamic control command to robotic systems. A key
feature of the proposed approach is that the muscle synergy and corresponding
activation curve are employed to calculate a force generated by a tool at the
robot end effector. A test bed for experiments consisted of two armband type
surface electromyography sensors, an RGB-d camera, and a Kinova Gen2 robotic
manipulator to verify the proposed approach. The result showed that both force
and position commands could be successfully transferred to the robotic
manipulator via our muscle synergy-based kinodynamic interface.
