A Preliminary Study on Fatigue Estimation for Underwater Robot Operator Using sEMG Signals

Abstract

When remotely controlling an underwater robot, the operator may experience a decrease in work efficiency and an increased risk of operational errors due to the absence of robot environmental information such as robot posture and movement, and a sense of disorientation caused by teleoperation. To prevent this, the author is conducting a motion seat design study to transmit the robot’s posture and movement to the operator. However, the motion seat may induce the fatigue to the operator due to motion sickness and cybersickness. Specially, these motion sicknesses may be aggravated when missynchronization condition and repetitive movement conditions. In this study, a preliminary research was conducted to measure the operator’s fatigue using surface Electromyography (sEMG) signal and adjust the motion seat movement according to the level of fatigue. The author attached sEMG sensors to the operator’s arm and measured the sEMG signal when applying various seat motions using a six degree of freedom motion seat, and analyzed the acquired sEMG signals. As a result, this experiment was showed that the operators showed similar trends in signal strength, signal intensity, and median frequency of sEMG signals according to the operation time.