Waldez Azevedo Gomes Junior (Larsen) will defend his thesis on Monday, December 13th at 2pm in room A008.

His presentation is entitled “Improving Ergonomics Through Physical Human-Robot Collaboration” and will be in English.

Abstract:

This thesis aims to provide tools for improving ergonomics at work environments. Some work activities in industry are commonly executed by workers in a non-ergonomic fashion, which may lead to musculoskeletal disorders in the short or in the long term.

Work-related Musculoskeletal Disorders (WMSDs) are a major health issue worldwide, that also represents important costs both for society and companies. WMSDs are known to be caused by multiple factors, such as repetitive motion, excessive force, and awkward, non-ergonomic body postures. Not surprisingly, work environments with such factors may present an incidence of WMSDs of up to 3 or 4 times higher than in the overall population.
Here, our approach is to evaluate the human motion with respect to ergonomics indexes, optimize the motion, and intervene on the task based on the optimized motion.

To evaluate the body posture ergonomics, we developed a Digital Human Model (DHM) simulation capable of replaying whole-body motions.
In simulation, the initial movement can be iteratively improved, until an optimal ergonomic whole-body motion is obtained.
We make the case that a robot in physical interaction with a human could drive the human towards more ergonomic whole-body motions, possibly to an ergonomically optimal motion. To design a robot controller that influences the body posture, we first investigate the human motor behavior in a human-human co-manipulation study. In this human dyad study, we observed motor behavior patterns that were used to design a collaboration controller for physical human-robot interaction (pHRI). In a new study, the same co-manipulation task was then executed by humans collaborating with a Franka Emika Panda robot.