Human Arm simulation for interactive constrained environment design

Liang Ma (1, 2) , Ruina Ma (1) , Damien Chablat (1) , Fouad Bennis (1)

1 IRCCyN - Institut de Recherche en Communications et en Cybernétique de Nantes
2 DIE - Dept. Industrial Engineering, Tsinghua University

During the conceptual and prototype design stage of an industrial product, it is crucial to take assembly/disassembly and maintenance operations in advance. A well-designed system should enable relatively easy access of operating manipulators in the constrained environment and reduce musculoskeletal disorder risks for those manual handling operations. Trajectory planning comes up as an important issue for those assembly and maintenance operations under a constrained environment, since it determines the accessibility and the other ergonomics issues, such as muscle effort and its related fatigue. In this paper, a customer-oriented interactive approach is proposed to partially solve ergonomic related issues encountered during the design stage under a constrained system for the operator's convenience. Based on a single objective optimization method, trajectory planning for different operators could be generated automatically. Meanwhile, a motion capture based method assists the operator to guide the trajectory planning interactively when either a local minimum is encountered within the single objective optimization or the operator prefers guiding the virtual human manually. Besides that, a physical engine is integrated into this approach to provide physically realistic simulation in real time manner, so that collision free path and related dynamic information could be computed to determine further muscle fatigue and accessibility of a product design

Mots clés: virtual human; constrained environment design; optimization; motion capture; trajectory planning

Domaines: Robotique [cs.RO]

Liang Ma, Ruina Ma, Damien Chablat, Fouad Bennis. Human Arm simulation for interactive constrained environment design. International Journal on Interactive Design and Manufacturing, 2012, pp.1-12. ⟨10.1007/s12008-012-0162-z⟩. ⟨hal-00705161⟩