Upper Body Motion Tracking System with Inertial Sensors for Ergonomic Issues in Industrial Environments
Recently, motion tracking techniques to acquire human body movements have broadened their range of applications from sports training, to rehabilitation, to ergonomics issues. For industrial applications, motion capture systems are largely used to acquire
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Abstract Recently, motion tracking techniques to acquire human body movements have broadened their range of applications from sports training, to rehabilitation, to ergonomics issues. For industrial applications, motion capture systems are largely used to acquire workers movements to improve working conditions, comfort, safety, etc. Several tracking solutions have been provided to analyze trunk and upper limbs movement based on different sensing technologies such as optical systems, audio systems, radar systems, magnetic systems, inertial systems and mechanical motion systems. Motion tracking with inertial sensors has been an active research area due to its several advantages. In this paper the authors introduce a motion tracking method of arbitrary human upper body motion. Low cost wearable inertial sensors and CPU unit are used in the proposed approach to track the upper body movement in 3D space and in real time. Keywords Motion tracking
Inertial sensors
F. Caputo (&) E. D’Amato Department of Industrial and Information Engineering, Second University of Naples, Via Roma 29, 81031 Aversa, CE, Italy e-mail: [email protected] E. D’Amato e-mail: [email protected] S. Spada F. Sessa Manufacturing Engineering, Fiat Crysler Automobiles (FCA), London, UK e-mail: [email protected] F. Sessa e-mail: [email protected] M. Losardo Linup S.r.l., via ex Aeroporto, 80038 Pomigliano d’Arco, NA, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 R. Goonetilleke and W. Karwowski (eds.), Advances in Physical Ergonomics and Human Factors, Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing 489, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-41694-6_77
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1 Introduction During the last years, the global industrial products market has changed becoming more competitive and unstable due to several factors (legal, financial, environmental, etc.); in this contest OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) realized that, in order to create a competitive advantage to fit effectively the global market, they need to achieve excellence and to develop more flexible assembly lines and better methods for job planning on the same lines. New standards on work organization also require new concepts for process design and for production: the human centered approach to improve manual assembly operations. In Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) this approach has been applied, during both Process design (by using advanced Human Simulations tools) and Process Industrialization/Production (by using the EAWS and ErgoUAS Methods for ergonomic optimization of assembly tasks and for optimal line balancing, therefore distributing the work load in the best way between workers along the lines). Using these methodologies already in the design phase of a new car’s manufacturing process, designers and engineers may have a preliminary estimation of the numerical indices used in the plants to check if assembly tasks are compliant to international standards (like European standards based on Niosh, OCRA, EAWS
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