Human limb impedance estimation performance of a widely used robot for human limb studies (HapticMASTER)

Abstract

A commercial robot, HapticMASTER, was often used to estimate 3-dimensional (3-D) human upper limb mechanical impedance transfer function matrix (MITFM) in recent years. However, the estimation accuracy and reliability of the upper limb MITFM with HapticMASTER is not evaluated fully. Accuracy was not assessed, and reliability was assessed partially with multiple coherence functions (CFs). The goal of this study was to evaluate the accuracy and reliability of the stochastic estimation of 3-D human upper limb MITFM using HapticMASTER. The results shows that one should be careful in using HapticMASTER for the stochastic estimation of human arm impedance.