Automatic selection of ergonomic indicators for the design of collaborative robots: a virtual-human in the loop approach

Pauline Maurice (1, 2) , Schlehuber Philipp (2) , Vincent Padois (2) , Yvan Measson (1, 2) , Philippe Bidaud (3, 2)

1 LIST (CEA) - Laboratoire d'Intégration des Systèmes et des Technologies
2 ISIR - Institut des Systèmes Intelligents et de Robotique
3 SYROCO - Systèmes robotiques Conception et Commande

The growing number of musculoskeletal disorders in industry could be addressed by the use of collaborative robots, which allow the joint manipulation of objects by both a robot and a person. Designing these robots requires to assess the ergonomic benefit they offer. However there is a lack of adapted assessment methods in the literature. Many biomechanical quantities can represent the physical solicitations to which the worker is exposed, but their relevance strongly depends on the considered task. This paper presents a method to automatically select relevant ergonomic indicators for a given task to be performed with a collaborative robot. A virtual human simulation is used to estimate thirty indicators for varying human and robot features. A variance-based analysis is then conducted to extract the most discriminating indicators. The method is validated on several different tasks. The relevance of the proposed approach is confirmed by the obtained results.

Domaines: Robotique [cs.RO]

Pauline Maurice, Schlehuber Philipp, Vincent Padois, Yvan Measson, Philippe Bidaud. Automatic selection of ergonomic indicators for the design of collaborative robots: a virtual-human in the loop approach. 2014 IEEE - RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots - Humanoids 2014, IEEE, Nov 2014, Madrid, Spain. pp.801-808, ⟨10.1109/HUMANOIDS.2014.7041455⟩. ⟨hal-01072228⟩