Towards Ergonomic Control of Collaborative Effort in Multi-human Mobile-robot Teams

In this paper, we propose a control framework for a multi-human and mobile-robot collaborative team, that takes into account the co-workers' ergonomic requirements as well as the demand for high flexibility in the manufacturing industries. The new MObile Collaborative robotic Assistant (MOCA), which is composed of a lightweight manipulator arm, an underactuated hand, and a mobile platform driven by four omni-directional wheels enabling mobility in the workspace, is able to accomplish multiple tasks in a wide area with a high level of adaptability. In addition, an ergonomics module to anticipate and mitigate the human risk factors by means of a multi-object optimisation is integrated into the framework to ensure human safety and improvement of working conditions. The main advantage of this approach is that MOCA can assist multiple human operators, reducing their physical risks, with fast-adaptive capacities due to agile mobility and advanced interaction and manipulation. We validated the proposed method with an experiment simulating a simple manufacturing line which involves two subjects and the MOCA. The results demonstrate that the proposed framework is able to address multi-workers' ergonomics with a high level of flexibility in the workplace.