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（NSF）宣布的未来投资十大新构想之一。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就业和工作环境的挑战和机遇。该奖项通过研究一项新技术是否以及如何提高工人的生产力、安全和福祉，实现了这一目标的一部分。动力的全身外骨骼具有增强人类身体能力的潜力，从而提高生产力并降低受伤风险，同时还保留了人类在动态、非结构化环境中工作的技能。外骨骼还可以让身体能力不同的人有机会进入并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应用中的表现，如制造业和仓储。该项目还研究了这项新技术可能对就业和工人的社会技术景观产生的潜在影响。该团队将开发一种新的控制界面和智能认知助手，使外骨骼的使用自然和直观，从而最大限度地减少学习时间，并能够适应动态环境。当使用物理能力增强系统时，多模态控制界面将允许增强用户的感知和认知，并根据用户和环境自适应控制外骨骼的辅助。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以产生广泛的社会和经济影响：通过了解这项新技术对劳动力多样化和劳动力市场结果的影响，该研究将促进有利于美国经济和美国工人的技术设计选择。与行业合作伙伴的合作，包括Sarcos Robotics和通用电气，将进一步确保该项目的工业相关性。该项目将推进外骨骼控制、人机合作、人为因素和增强现实系统方面的知识和技术进步。将开发增强现实界面，以改善用户对外骨骼能力的心理模型并增加态势感知，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策略。在人机协作方面，将开发一种基于自适应预测器的高级外骨骼辅助参数控制器。这将考虑到人对系统的时变响应以及不同用户可能产生的不同稳态特性，从而实现紧密耦合的人在环系统。对各种工人的学习和适应进行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（包括有认知和身体障碍的人）的影响的关键。虽然自动化的影响（用技术取代工人）已经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率和福祉、行业利润和一般劳动力市场影响的实证模型。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识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.