Estimation of Involuntary Components of Human Arm Impedance in Multi-Joint Movements via Feedback Jerk Isolation

Stable and efficient coordination in physical human-robot interaction requires consideration of human feedback behavior. In unpredictable tasks, where voluntary cognitive feedback is too slow to guarantee desired task execution, the human must rely on involuntary intrinsic and reflexive feedback. The combined effects of these two feedback mechanisms and the inertial characteristics can be summarized in the involuntary impedance components. In this work, we present a method for the estimation of the involuntary impedance components of the human arm in multi-joint movements. We apply force perturbations to evoke feedback jerks that can be isolated using a high pass filter and limit the duration of the estimation interval to guarantee exclusion of voluntary cognitive feedback. Dynamic regressor representation of the rigid body dynamics of the arm and first order Taylor series expansion of the feedback behavior yield a model that is linear in the involuntary impedance components. The constant values of the inertial parameters are estimated in a static posture maintenance task and subsequently inserted to estimate the remaining components in a dynamic movement task. The method is validated with simulated data of a neuromechanical model of the human arm and its performance is compared to established methods from the literature. The results of the validation demonstrate superior estimation performance for moderate movement velocities, and less influence of the variability of the movements. The applicability to real data and the plausibility of the limited estimation interval are successfully demonstrated in an experiment with human participants