Knowledge-based Planning for the Use of Exoskeletons

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The interaction and integration of humans and technology have intensified in recent years. As one approach for human-machine interaction, exoskeletons have increasingly been emerging as a suitable support technology in industry. Depending on the production scenario, exoskeletons are suited to support workers, as they are capable of either facilitating and adding movements or stabilizing postures. Until now, supportive methods or tools for the simulation-based selection and adaption of exoskeletons only exist for single aspects though. Due to the lack of evidence and models for the detailed and integrated simulation of exoskeletons in manual production scenarios with respect to dynamic and kinematic aspects, uncertainty remains about the targeted use and supportive effect of exoskeletons on the human body in work activities. To address this issue, ExoExpert aims to develop a novel planning method including a simulation model to provide decision support for identifying exoskeletons for manual production processes and adapting system behaviour. The project is supposed to assist ergonomists and engineers in appropriately evaluating, selecting, and adapting exoskeletons for industrial scenarios prior to system implementation. The knowledge- and simulation-based method consists of four major building blocks. Based on the analysis of characteristics and state-of the- art methods, an (1) evaluation systematic for heterogenous exoskeletons will be conceptualized. This systematic will serve as the basis for the development of the (2) co-simulation model, which is composed of the modeling and simulation of (a) process-related as well as (b) technical and biomechanical parameters. A (3) decision model will operationalize the co-simulation results concerning the context-adapted selection of exoskeletons. The last step provides the (4) practical validation and optimization of the developed method using exoskeletal demonstrators before the method is generalized. ExoExpert first-time enables to interactively model and ergonomically evaluate exoskeletons. The fundamental innovation lies in its holistic knowledge- and simulation-based approach. Besides, the method helps check possibilities of movement executions of exoskeletons prior to implementation. Thus, the method can potentially make an unsuccessful, time- and money-consuming implementation of exoskeletons redundant and help reduce the engineering workload. The joint research will be carried out on the Chair of Production Systems at the Ruhr University Bochum (RUB) and Chair of Production Technology at the University Innsbruck (UIBK).