FW-HTF: Whole-body Exoskeletons for Advanced Vocational Enhancement (WEAVE)

人类技术前沿工作的未来(FW-HTF)是美国国家科学基金会宣布的未来投资的十大新想法之一。FW-HTF跨部门计划旨在通过支持融合研究来应对不断变化的工作和工作格局带来的挑战和机遇。这个奖项实现了这一目标的一部分，通过审查一项新技术是否以及如何能够提高工人的生产率、安全性和幸福感。有动力的全身外骨骼有可能增强人类的体能，从而提高生产力和降低受伤风险，同时还保留了人类在动态、非结构化环境中操作的技能。外骨骼还可以让具有不同身体能力的人有机会进入并继续从事对身体要求很高的职业。该项目将完成关键的基础研究，以使外骨骼有效地提高人类在工业用途(如制造和仓储)中的表现。该项目还考察了这项新技术可能对就业和工人的社会技术格局产生的潜在影响。该团队将开发一种新的控制界面和智能认知助手，使外骨骼使用自然和直观，从而最大限度地减少学习时间，并使其能够适应动态环境。多模式控制接口将允许在使用物理容量增强系统时增强用户的感知和认知，并根据用户和环境对来自外骨骼的辅助进行自适应控制。这项研究的最终结果将帮助工人在动态和信息丰富的工业环境中高效、无缝地操作。外骨骼的工业应用可能会产生广泛的社会和经济影响：通过了解这种新技术对劳动力多样化和劳动力市场结果的影响，研究将促进有利于美国经济和美国工人的技术设计选择。与包括Sarcos Robotics和通用电气在内的行业合作伙伴的合作将进一步确保该项目的行业相关性。该项目将促进外骨骼控制、人-机器人合作、人的因素和增强现实系统方面的知识和最新技术。将开发一个增强现实界面，以改善用户对外骨骼能力的心理模型，并提高对情况的认识，从而使用户能够制定仅由新扩展的物理能力提供的新工作战略。在人机协作方面，将开发一种基于自适应预测器的外骨骼高层辅助参数控制器。这将考虑到人对系统的时变响应以及取决于用户的不同稳态特性的可能性，从而实现紧密耦合的人在环系统。对不同工人的学习和适应能力的评估将是使开发的设计更具包容性和有效性的关键，也是阐明外骨骼技术对劳动力多样化的影响的关键，包括有认知和身体障碍的人。虽然自动化(用技术取代工人)的影响在经济学文献中得到了广泛的研究，但这项工作将产生第一个关于增强对工人生产力和福祉、行业利润和一般劳动力市场影响的实证模型。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The Future of Work at the Human-Technology Frontier (FW-HTF) is one of 10 new Big Ideas for Future Investment announced by NSF. The FW-HTF cross-directorate program aims to respond to the challenges and opportunities of the changing landscape of jobs and work by supporting convergent research. This award fulfills part of that aim, by examining whether and how a new technology can improve worker productivity, safety, and well-being. Powered, full-body exoskeletons have the potential to augment human physical capacity, thereby increasing productivity and lowering injury risks, while also preserving human skill for operating in dynamic, unstructured environments. Exoskeletons could also allow people with different physical abilities the opportunity to enter and stay employed in physically-demanding occupations. This project will complete critical fundamental research necessary to make exoskeletons effective for augmenting human performance in industrial use, such as manufacturing and warehousing. The project also examines the potential impacts this new technology may have on the sociotechnological landscape of jobs and workers. The team will develop a new control interface and an intelligent cognitive assistant to make exoskeleton use natural and intuitive, thus minimizing learning time and enabling adaptation to dynamic environments. The multimodal control interface will allow for augmentation of a user's perception and cognition when using physical capacity augmentation systems, and adaptive control of assistance from the exoskeleton according to user and context. The end results of this research will help workers to operate efficiently and seamlessly in dynamic and information-rich industrial settings. Industrial adoption of exoskeletons can have broad-reaching social and economic implications: by understanding the ramifications of this new technology for workforce diversification and labor market outcomes, the research will facilitate technology design choices that benefit the U.S. economy and U.S. workers. Collaboration with industry partners, including Sarcos Robotics and General Electric, will further insure industrial relevance of this project. This project will advance knowledge and state-of-the-art in exoskeleton control, human-robot cooperation, human factors, and augmented reality systems. An augmented reality interface to improve the user's mental model of exoskeleton capabilities and increase situational awareness will be developed, thereby enabling users to formulate new work strategies only afforded by the newly extended physical capabilities. In terms of human-robot cooperation, an adaptive predictor-based controller of high-level exoskeleton assistance parameters will be developed. This will account for the time varying response of the human to the system and the potential for different steady-state characteristics depending on the user, so as to achieve a tightly-coupled human-in-the-loop system. The assessments of learning and adaptation across a diverse range of workers will be key to making the developed designs more inclusive and effective, and to elucidating the effects of exoskeleton technologies on workforce diversification, including people with cognitive and physical impairments. While the impact of automation (replacing workers with technology) has been extensively studied in the economics literature, this work will generate the first empirical models of the effects of augmentation on worker productivity and well-being, industry profits, and the labor market in general.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.