Methodology

2.1 Search protocol

Searches were executed across arXiv (full-text and listing), IEEE Xplore abstracts, PMLR/CoRL/RSS proceedings, Nature portfolio journals, Frontiers, MDPI, PhysioNet, Hugging Face Datasets, Zenodo, figshare, IEEE DataPort and Harvard Dataverse, plus laboratory and project pages.

Query families:

• A (interface): "EMG teleoperation robot arm", "myoelectric teleoperation manipulator", "sEMG robot hand control", "tele-impedance", "prosthetic teleoperation robot".
• B (data): "EMG imitation learning", "myoelectric demonstration robot policy", "muscle activity robot learning", "sEMG behavior cloning", "EMG VLA", "biosignal robot manipulation dataset".
• C (artifacts): "electromechanical delay EMG", "controller delay myoelectric", "electrode shift classification accuracy", "limb position effect myoelectric", "cross-session EMG degradation", "donning doffing EMG".
• D (quality theory): "data quality imitation learning", "demonstration quality metric", "movement smoothness SPARC", "teleoperation interface comparison policy success".
• E (integration): "force conditioned imitation learning", "tactile VLA", "variable impedance learning from demonstration", "LoRA fine-tuning VLA", "shared autonomy latent action".

2.2 Inclusion and exclusion

Included: peer-reviewed papers and arXiv preprints reporting either (i) EMG/prosthetic control of a robot manipulator or hand, (ii) quantitative EMG artifact characterisation, (iii) demonstration-quality effects on learned policies, or (iv) force/tactile/impedance conditioning of visuomotor policies. Excluded: EMG gesture recognition with no robot and no force ground truth, unless used to establish decoder-quality bounds; prosthetics work with no learning or robotics component; and non-manipulation robotics.

2.3 Evidence grading

Because a substantial fraction of the relevant 2026 literature is unrefereed, we grade sources:

• [A] Peer-reviewed with extractable quantitative results.
• [B] Peer-reviewed, results directional or partially extractable.
• [C] arXiv preprint with extractable results, no venue.
• [D] Company blog, press release or marketing page.

Any claim resting solely on [D] is flagged inline. We follow the practice, established by the TRI Large Behavior Models evaluation [arXiv:2507.05331], of reporting what could not be verified.

2.4 Limitations of this review

Several primary sources were inaccessible: the founding tele-impedance paper (Ajoudani, Tsagarakis & Bicchi, IJRR 2012) is paywalled and we could not extract its quantitative results; Semantic Scholar's API and several PubMed pages were rate-limited or CAPTCHA-blocked, so a small number of electrode-shift figures are cited second-hand through a 2025 consolidating review and are marked as such. No meta-analysis was attempted; the corpus is too heterogeneous in task, robot and metric to support one, which is itself a finding (§12).

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