Robust interactive design for ergonomics and safety: R-IDEaS procedure and applications

Abstract

This paper presents an interactive design method aimed at improving workplace health and safety. Human performances and anthropometric variability are carefully considered to make the workplace “robust” from a safety point of view. This topic is of increasing interest to industries that plan to make safer workplaces without renouncing to their productivity targets. A challenging issue concerns the evaluation of the effects of sources of anthropometric variability in the process by using just a small sample of real or digital humans. The adoption of a discretization technique helps to solve this problem and saving time and resources. Through real industrial case studies, the authors investigate the main ergonomic and safety issues faced during the development of both manual and human–robot hybrid workcells.