Too much of a good thing?
Advances in technology are helping to transform manufacturing, with machines being used to take some of the physical strain from human workers and increase efficiency. Exoskeletons and cobots are just two of the measures that have been introduced to help support workers on assembly lines. But does using both of these technologies together deliver additional benefits or actually make things harder for humans?
New research has examined the effect of using a passive upper-limb exoskeleton and an adaptive cobot in automotive assembly. The two devices were created as independent systems but were designed to operate together during collaborative tasks.
The study participants were asked to perform two assembly tasks under a range of conditions, including using the exoskeleton with a static or a moving cobot. While each of the devices did reduce the biomechanical load when used on their own, combining them in confined workspaces led to increased cognitive and coordination demands that offset the physical benefits.
The study, published in the journal Ergonomics, said: “The findings challenge the assumption that combining assistive technologies amplifies their individual benefits: in confined automotive workspaces, the simultaneous deployment of the two devices redistributed demands across physical, cognitive and coordination dimension instead of uniformly reducing them.
“This also suggests that the effects of assistive technologies on work cannot be adequately understood through isolated or single-dimension evaluations, and that deployment decisions require empirical assessment of how devices interact with each other, with the workspace and with the operators who use them.”
