ETD

Archivio digitale delle tesi discusse presso l'Università di Pisa

Tesi etd-09232017-110138


Tipo di tesi
Tesi di laurea magistrale
Autore
LANOTTE, FRANCESCO
URN
etd-09232017-110138
Titolo
Design, development and experimental validation of a control strategy for an active pelvis orthosis for assisting workers in load lifting tasks
Dipartimento
INGEGNERIA DELL'INFORMAZIONE
Corso di studi
BIONICS ENGINEERING
Relatori
relatore Prof. Vitiello, Nicola
correlatore Dott.ssa Crea, Simona
controrelatore Prof. Vozzi, Giovanni
Parole chiave
  • Wearable robotics
  • Adaptive cooperative control strategy
  • Worker support
Data inizio appello
13/10/2017
Consultabilità
Non consultabile
Data di rilascio
13/10/2087
Riassunto
The sixth European Working Conditions Survey carried out in 2015 in 35 countries revealed that many workers are still exposed to the risk of physical injuries and diseases. Indeed, work-related musculoskeletal diseases (MSDs) are still common among blue collar workers. In recent years academic and industrial research teams have been developing wearable robots to provide support to the workers, with the final goal of reducing the risk of MSDs occurrence. Nevertheless, comfort and ergonomics issues, intuitiveness of the control strategy and compliant mechatronic designs are still open technological and scientific challenges for the development of robots that can be really accepted by end-users.
To advance the state of art, this work aimed to develop an adaptive cooperative control strategy to assist workers in lifting operations; it has been designed for a robotic powered pelvis orthosis, to provide a hip extension torque during the lifting phase, synchronously with the biological torque of the hip extensor muscles. The developed algorithm is time-independent and does not suffer from inter- and intra- subject variability.
After a preliminary offline validation, the algorithm has been implemented and tested on the real-time controller of the active pelvis orthosis. The experimental validation of the developed assistive strategy was carried out with five healthy subjects performing lifting operations, in three experimental conditions, i.e. without wearing the exoskeleton and wearing the exoskeleton, controlled in transparent and assistive modes. Results prove that the algorithm is capable of adapting to the movement pattern of different users with good performance and that the proposed strategy can be potentially effective for reducing the effort of the muscles involved in the movement. Further investigations are necessary to validate the effectiveness of the control strategy on a larger population.
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