Estimating Human Muscular Fatigue in Dynamic Collaborative Robotic Tasks with Learning-Based Models

TL;DR

This paper develops and compares machine learning models, including CNNs and tree-based regressors, to estimate human muscular fatigue during dynamic robot-assisted tasks using EMG signals, aiming for real-time fatigue monitoring and adaptive control.

Contribution

It introduces a data-driven, regression-based framework for estimating muscle fatigue in dynamic pHRI, demonstrating robustness and transferability across different movement patterns.

Findings

CNN achieved the lowest RMSE of 20.8%

Tree-based models performed close to CNN in accuracy

Models showed robustness to unseen movement directions

Abstract

Assessing human muscle fatigue is critical for optimizing performance and safety in physical human-robot interaction(pHRI). This work presents a data-driven framework to estimate fatigue in dynamic, cyclic pHRI using arm-mounted surface electromyography(sEMG). Subject-specific machine-learning regression models(Random Forest, XGBoost, and Linear Regression predict the fraction of cycles to fatigue(FCF) from three frequency-domain and one time-domain EMG features, and are benchmarked against a convolutional neural network(CNN) that ingests spectrograms of filtered EMG. Framing fatigue estimation as regression (rather than classification) captures continuous progression toward fatigue, supporting earlier detection, timely intervention, and adaptive robot control. In experiments with ten participants, a collaborative robot under admittance control guided repetitive lateral (left-right) end-effector motions until muscular fatigue. Average FCF RMSE across participants was 20.8+/-4.3% for the CNN, 23.3+/-3.8% for Random Forest, 24.8+/-4.5% for XGBoost, and 26.9+/-6.1% for Linear Regression. To probe cross-task generalization, one participant additionally performed unseen vertical (up-down) and circular repetitions; models trained only on lateral data were tested directly and largely retained accuracy, indicating robustness to changes in movement direction, arm kinematics, and muscle recruitment, while Linear Regression deteriorated. Overall, the study shows that both feature-based ML and spectrogram-based DL can estimate remaining work capacity during repetitive pHRI, with the CNN delivering the lowest error and the tree-based models close behind. The reported transfer to new motion patterns suggests potential for practical fatigue monitoring without retraining for every task, improving operator protection and enabling fatigue-aware shared autonomy, for safer fatigue-adaptive pHRI control.