Industrial Wearable Robots: A HUMANufacturing Approach

Abstract

In the last decades, exoskeletons have mostly been developed and studied for applications in the medical field, as rehabilitation or assistive devices for patients with movement disabilities. Recently, given the high performance of emerging wearable technologies, new applications have been proposed including the every-day support of able-bodied subjects such as workers. The execution of repetitive operations or actions that require excessive effort are the main causes of musculoskeletal injuries in people working in production lines or construction sites. The Industry 4.0 program is bringing companies to re-think their processes by considering human factors, ergonomics and sustainability issues. This is leading to a new trend in automation, which place the workers at the center of a modern smart factory, allowing them to take advantages of new interconnected tools. This new tendency fully embodied Comau’s vision. The company, in fact, has coined a term for better picturing its vision: HUMANufacturing. In this framework exoskeletons have the potential to become more and more adopted by industries as tools to provide support to the workers, preventing the rising of musculoskeletal diseases. This paper provides an overview of the main drivers of this nascent technology. Specifically, it aims to define the requirements that led to the development of an industrial exoskeleton, considering both the end-users and the manufacturers perspective, and showing how the HUMANufactuing approach has a role during the development of a new product.