paper

Prosthetic Hand Manipulation System Based on EMG and Eye Tracking Powered by the Neuromorphic Processor AltAi

arXiv:2601.17991

Abstract

This paper presents a novel neuromorphic control architecture for upper-limb prostheses that combines surface electromyography (sEMG) with gaze-guided computer vision. The system uses a spiking neural network deployed on the neuromorphic processor AltAi to classify EMG patterns in real time while an eye-tracking headset and scene camera identify the object within the user's focus. In our prototype, the same EMG recognition model that was originally developed for a conventional GPU is deployed as a spiking network on AltAi, achieving comparable accuracy while operating in a sub-watt power regime, which enables a lightweight, wearable implementation. For six distinct functional gestures recorded from upper-limb amputees, the system achieves robust recognition performance comparable to state-of-the-art myoelectric interfaces. When the vision pipeline restricts the decision space to three context-appropriate gestures for the currently viewed object, recognition accuracy increases to roughly 95% while excluding unsafe, object-inappropriate grasps. These results indicate that the proposed neuromorphic, context-aware controller can provide energy-efficient and reliable prosthesis control and has the potential to improve safety and usability in everyday activities for people with upper-limb amputation.

This paper has been accepted for publication at LBR of HRI 2026 conference

Prosthetic Hand Manipulation System Based on EMG and Eye Tracking Powered by the Neuromorphic Processor AltAi · wovepaper