Human-Centered Approach for the Design of a Collaborative Robotics Workstation

Collaborative robotic solutions, where human workers and robots share their skills, are emerging in the industrial context. In order to achieve an appropriate level of Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC), the workstations’ design has to be human-centered and adaptive to the workers’ characteristics/limitations, considering ergonomic criteria. This study corresponds to the first phase of a research project to apply HRC to minimize the musculoskeletal risk associated with a manual assembly task (industrial furniture manufacturing). A new workstation was designed and an ergonomic approach was developed to assess the main risk factors, as well as to optimize the future task allocation between human workers and robots. A questionnaire about working conditions and musculoskeletal symptomology was applied to a selected group of 8 workers. Rapid Upper Limb Assessment and Strain Index were applied (across 38 postures) to assess musculoskeletal risk related to the assembly tasks. In this study, we propose an ergonomic approach to orient the design and task allocation of HRC work systems. This approach allowed the identification of workers’ complaints and risk factors that can be mitigated with future implementations of HRC.