On the Design and Control of an Empowering Manipulator to Increase the Capabilities of Humans in Industrial Applications.

Empowering robotic solutions are exploited for industrial applications in orderto reduce/limit risk factors related to musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs) and toimprove the capabilities of humans. This paper aims at proposing both (a) thedesign and (b) the control of a cooperative manipulator in order to empower hu-mans in onerous industrial tasks execution. (a) a dual driven actuation (DDA)is proposed and described for the shoulder joint of an empowering roboticsystem. (b) a fuzzy impedance control based approach to assist the human op-erator while lifting (partially) unknown weight components is proposed. Thecontrol method has been validated in a hatrack-like component installation,case-study related to the H2020 CleanSky 2 EURECA project. The proposedapplication has been shown during the KUKA Innovation Award. As a testplatform, a KUKA iiwa 14 R820 has been used.