Chapter 60 - Digital human modeling for collaborative robotics

Abstract

Work-related musculoskeletal disorders (WMSDs) in industry represent a major health issue worldwide. Collaborative robotics, in which a human and a robot collaborate together to jointly carry out a task, is a possible solution to help decrease the prevalence of WMSDs. But designing efficient collaborative robots requires to assess the ergonomic benefit they offer. Similar to other domains such as vehicle or workstation design, the use of a digital human simulation (DHS) can cut down the development cost and time of a collaborative robot by replacing the physical mock-up of the robot with a virtual one easier to modify. Simulating human–robot collaborative tasks however pose specific challenges because the human and the robot form a highly coupled dynamic system in which the motion of each partner depends on the forces exchanged. Therefore, a dynamic simulation is required to obtain reliable measurements for ergonomic assessments. The first part of this chapter details the challenges of DHS for collaborative robotics. State-of-the-art work on DHS including collaborative robots is reviewed to identify which questions currently remain open. An optimization-based method is then proposed to animate a digital human model (DHM) in the context of human–robot collaboration. The second part of this chapter presents an application of the proposed DHM animation method. A human–robot collaborative task is successfully simulated and allows to quantify the effect of kinematic, dynamic, and control parameters of the robot on the DHM posture and effort.