FW-HTF: Whole-body Exoskeletons for Advanced Vocational Enhancement (WEAVE)

FW-HTF：用于高级职业增强的全身外骨骼 (WEAVE)

• 批准号: 2242610
• 负责人: Divya Srinivasan
• 金额: $ 298.19万
• 依托单位: Clemson University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2022
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2022-09-01 至 2024-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2242610&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: FW; HTF; Whole; body; Exoskeletons

The Future of Work at the Human-Technology Frontier (FW-HTF) is one of 10 new Big Ideas for Future Investment announced by NSF. The FW-HTF cross-directorate program aims to respond to the challenges and opportunities of the changing landscape of jobs and work by supporting convergent research. This award fulfills part of that aim, by examining whether and how a new technology can improve worker productivity, safety, and well-being. Powered, full-body exoskeletons have the potential to augment human physical capacity, thereby increasing productivity and lowering injury risks, while also preserving human skill for operating in dynamic, unstructured environments. Exoskeletons could also allow people with different physical abilities the opportunity to enter and stay employed in physically-demanding occupations. This project will complete critical fundamental research necessary to make exoskeletons effective for augmenting human performance in industrial use, such as manufacturing and warehousing. The project also examines the potential impacts this new technology may have on the sociotechnological landscape of jobs and workers. The team will develop a new control interface and an intelligent cognitive assistant to make exoskeleton use natural and intuitive, thus minimizing learning time and enabling adaptation to dynamic environments. The multimodal control interface will allow for augmentation of a user's perception and cognition when using physical capacity augmentation systems, and adaptive control of assistance from the exoskeleton according to user and context. The end results of this research will help workers to operate efficiently and seamlessly in dynamic and information-rich industrial settings. Industrial adoption of exoskeletons can have broad-reaching social and economic implications: by understanding the ramifications of this new technology for workforce diversification and labor market outcomes, the research will facilitate technology design choices that benefit the U.S. economy and U.S. workers. Collaboration with industry partners, including Sarcos Robotics and General Electric, will further insure industrial relevance of this project. This project will advance knowledge and state-of-the-art in exoskeleton control, human-robot cooperation, human factors, and augmented reality systems. An augmented reality interface to improve the user's mental model of exoskeleton capabilities and increase situational awareness will be developed, thereby enabling users to formulate new work strategies only afforded by the newly extended physical capabilities. In terms of human-robot cooperation, an adaptive predictor-based controller of high-level exoskeleton assistance parameters will be developed. This will account for the time varying response of the human to the system and the potential for different steady-state characteristics depending on the user, so as to achieve a tightly-coupled human-in-the-loop system. The assessments of learning and adaptation across a diverse range of workers will be key to making the developed designs more inclusive and effective, and to elucidating the effects of exoskeleton technologies on workforce diversification, including people with cognitive and physical impairments. While the impact of automation (replacing workers with technology) has been extensively studied in the economics literature, this work will generate the first empirical models of the effects of augmentation on worker productivity and well-being, industry profits, and the labor market in general.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

人类技术领域（FW-HTF）的工作未来是NSF宣布的未来投资的10个新想法之一。 FW-HTF跨指导计划旨在通过支持融合研究来应对不断变化的工作和工作环境的挑战和机遇。该奖项通过研究新技术是否可以提高工人的生产力，安全性和福祉来实现该目标的一部分。动力的全身外骨骼有可能增强人类的身体能力，从而提高生产率并降低伤害风险，同时还保留在动态，非结构化环境中运行的人类技能。外骨骼还可以使具有不同身体能力的人有机会进入和留在身体的职业中。 该项目将完成至关重要的基础研究，以使外骨骼有效地增强工业用途的人类绩效，例如制造和仓储。该项目还研究了这项新技术可能对工作和工人的社会技术格局产生的潜在影响。 该团队将开发一个新的控制界面和智能认知助手，以使外骨骼使用自然和直观，从而最大程度地减少学习时间并使适应动态环境。使用物理容量增强系统时，多模式控制接口将允许用户的感知和认知增强，并根据用户和上下文对外骨骼的帮助自适应控制。这项研究的最终结果将有助于工人在动态和信息丰富的工业环境中无缝和无缝地运作。外骨骼的工业采用可以具有广泛的社会和经济影响：通过了解这项新技术在劳动力多元化和劳动力市场成果中的后果，该研究将促进有益于美国经济和美国工人的技术设计选择。与包括Sarcos机器人技术和通用电气在内的行业合作伙伴的合作将进一步确保该项目的工业意义。该项目将推进外骨骼控制，人类机器人合作，人为因素和增强现实系统的知识和最新知识。将开发一个增强现实接口，以提高用户的外骨骼功能的心理模型并提高情境意识，从而使用户能够制定仅由新扩展的物理能力提供的新工作策略。在人类机器人合作方面，将开发基于自适应预测的高级外骨骼辅助参数的控制器。这将解释人类对系统的响应的变化时间以及根据用户的不同稳态特征的潜力，以实现紧密耦合的人类在环境系统中。对各种工人进行学习和适应的评估将是使开发的设计更具包容性和有效性的关键，并阐明外骨骼技术对劳动力多样化的影响，包括认知和身体障碍的人。虽然在经济学文献中已经对自动化的影响（用技术代替工人）进行了广泛的研究，但这项工作将产生第一个经验模型，即增强对工人生产力和福祉，行业利润，行业利润，劳动力市场的影响，一般劳动力市场。该奖项反映了NSF的法定任务，并通过评估范围来反映出支持者的知识群体的支持和基础的支持者。

项目成果

Changes in kinematics and muscle activity when learning to use a whole-body powered exoskeleton for stationary load handling

学习使用全身动力外骨骼进行固定负载处理时运动学和肌肉活动的变化

• DOI: 10.1177/1071181322661218
• 发表时间: 2022
• 期刊: Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting
• 作者: Park, Hanjun;Kim, Sunwook;Nussbaum, Maury A.;Srinivasan, Divya
• 通讯作者: Srinivasan, Divya