Model-based mechanical design of a passive lower-limb exoskeleton for assisting workers in shotcrete projection
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Model-based mechanical design of a passive lower-limb exoskeleton for assisting workers in shotcrete projection Stefano L. Capitani . Matteo Bianchi . Nicola Secciani Enrico Meli . Alessandro Ridolfi
. Marco Pagliai .
Received: 27 April 2020 / Accepted: 28 November 2020 Ó The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Despite the current industrial trend towards automation, many workers are still daily exposed to heavy loads during their duties. Regarding the construction industry, the shotcrete projection results in a particularly arduous whole-body effort for the so-called ‘‘concrete reinforcement workers’’. In this paper, the design of a passive robotic human assistance tool to assist workers in dealing with the specific task of shotcrete projection will be described. If the design of an effective aid plays a crucial role in improving the job’s quality, following the guidelines given by the French company Eiffage Infrastructures; besides, the acceptance of the proposed solution shall have special consideration. Therefore, starting from an in-site assessment of the scenario, the presented solution has been profoundly adjusted to address the issues coming from this particular task. The exoskeleton adaptability to different lower-limb activities has been preserved without lowering its comfort during daily life in the working area. The developed solution’s operation range has been specifically optimized to assist the worker during specific efforts without hindering the other movements.
S. L. Capitani M. Bianchi N. Secciani (&) M. Pagliai E. Meli A. Ridolfi Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Florence, Via di Santa Marta, 3, 50139 Florence, Italy e-mail: [email protected]
Keywords Wearable robotics Exoskeletons for workers Passive lower-limb exoskeletons Taskoriented design
1 Introduction The increasing need for flexibility in the industry claims more and more workers on the shop floor, especially in highly-automated environments. Indeed, some production processes can not be fully automated due to frequent changes of activity, product type, or order size. In all of these cases, human intervention is necessary, and the prevention of manual handling injuries is intensely required. Despite the on-going efforts in reducing the physical load and the risk of injury, many workers are still exposed to physical workloads due to material handling (over 30% of the work population in the EU), repetitive movements (63%), and awkward body postures (46%) [1]. A statistical analysis dated back to the early 2000s showed that three-quarters of the involved construction workers experienced at least one musculoskeletal disorder per year [2]. The same study also highlighted pain in the lower back as the most frequent symptom. In recent years, another survey has confirmed the same disorders at the top of the causes of absence from work [3]. Finally, data from the 2018 ‘‘Injuries, Illnesses, and Fatalities’’ database of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) shows that,
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