ITR:- Virtual surfaces for human/robot mutual labor

这是三年持续奖励的第一年资助。该项目解决了协助人类搬运重物的需求，因为这些任务使工人暴露于与工作相关的肌肉骨骼疾病的已知风险因素中，例如举起，弯曲，扭曲和保持尴尬的姿势。该项目将研究使用协作机器人来实现符合人体工程学的引导表面，以帮助人类操纵重物。有了这样的机制，负载可以被约束沿着无摩擦的导轨移动，并且当导轨将运动引导到目标时，允许人类在舒适的方向上施加力。协作机器人使用滚动触点直接实现被动引导约束，因此与传统机器人相比，它们的交互更安全，能耗更低。为了设计辅助指南约束，该项目将研究人类如何自然地与约束交互，假设这种交互的本质可以通过人类最小化某些努力概念的愿望来建模。有了这个模型，pi将设计指南，尽量减少必要的人力，并将实验验证模型的正确性。pi将开发软件，用于在杂乱的工作空间中自动规划接近最佳的导轨，并将使用cobot硬件在现实材料处理任务中测试导轨。在材料处理中产生的符合人体工程学的虚拟表面将减少与工作有关的肌肉骨骼疾病的发生。它还将提高生产力，在人机之间提供一个直观和安全的界面。最后，这项工作将揭示人类运动控制的新原理，因为辅助引导表面的设计需要更好地理解人类如何与约束相互作用。

This is the first year funding of a three-year continuing award. This project addresses the need to assist humans in heavy materials handling, since such tasks expose the worker to known risk factors for work-related musculoskeletal disorders, such as lifting, bending, twisting, and maintenance of awkward postures. This project will study the use of cobots to implement ergonomic guiding surfaces to assist a human in the manipulation of a heavy load. With such a mechanism, the load can be constrained to move along a frictionless guide, and the human is allowed to apply forces in directions which are comfortable while the guide directs the motion to the goal. Cobots use rolling contacts to directly implement passive guiding constraints, and as a result they are safer to interact with and use less power than a conventional robot. To design assistive guide constraints, the project will study how humans naturally interact with constraints assuming that the essential nature of this interaction can be modeled by the human's desire to minimize some notion of effort. With this model, The PIs will design guides that minimize the necessary human effort and will experimentally verify the correctness of the model. The PIs will develop software for automatically planning near-optimal guides in cluttered workspaces and will test the guides using cobot hardware on realistic materials handling tasks. The resulted ergonomic virtual surfaces in materials handling will reduce the occurrence of work-related musculoskeletal disorders. It will also increase productivity, providing an intuitive and safe interface between human and computer. Finally, this work will expose new principles in human motor control, as the design of assistive guiding surfaces requires a better understanding of how humans interact with constraints.