About the speaker
Loris Roveda received the MSc and Ph.D. degrees in mechanical engineering from Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy, in 2011 and 2015, respectively. He is currently a Senior Permanent Researcher with the Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence (IDSIA), University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland (SUPSI), Università della Svizzera italiana (USI), Manno, Switzerland, working on AI and ML techniques applied to industrial robotics (such as robot control, human-robot collaboration, and dynamics identification). He has been involved in many national and European projects. He is now coordinating the EIT-M SUPERHUMAN project. He is also the PI of the EUREKA EUROSTARS ACHEAS project and the EIT-M HCP-bO project.
Abstract
Manual labor is still strongly present in many industrial contexts (e.g., in aerospace, manufacturing, and especially in logistics). Such operations commonly involve onerous tasks requiring working in non-ergonomic conditions and manipulating heavy loads. As a result, work-related musculoskeletal disorders are still a major problem that needs to be tackled in the workplace. In particular, the back is one of the most affected regions. To solve such an issue, many efforts have been made in the design and control of devices to assist workers, with increasing attention towards wearable/exoskeleton devices, relieving the human from the task load. Besides upper and lower limbs exoskeletons, back-support exoskeletons have also been investigated, proposing both passive and active solutions, even if only a few prototypes effectively reached the market yet. In this presentation, a back-support exoskeleton is presented to address the above issues. The mechanical design of the exoskeleton is discussed, especially introducing both a passive and an active version of it. For the active device, the control design is also introduced.