The large-scale adoption of occupational exoskeletons (OEs) will only happen if clear evidence of effectiveness of the devices is available. Performing product-specific field validation studies would allow the stakeholders and decision-makers (e.g., employers, ergonomists, health, and safety departments) to assess OEs’ effectiveness in their specific work contexts and with experienced workers, who could further provide useful insights on practical issues related to exoskeleton daily use. This paper reviews present-day scientific methods for assessing the effectiveness of OEs in laboratory and field studies, and presents the vision of the authors on a roadmap that could lead to large-scale adoption of this technology. The analysis of the state-of-the-art shows methodological differences between laboratory and field studies. While the former are more extensively reported in scientific papers, they exhibit limited generalizability of the findings to real-world scenarios. On the contrary, field studies are limited in sample sizes and frequently focused only on subjective metrics. We propose a roadmap to promote large-scale knowledge-based adoption of OEs. It details that the analysis of the costs and benefits of this technology should be communicated to all stakeholders to facilitate informed decision making, so that each stakeholder can develop their specific role regarding this innovation. Large-scale field studies can help identify and monitor the possible side-effects related to exoskeleton use in real work situations, as well as provide a comprehensive scientific knowledge base to support the revision of ergonomics risk-assessment methods, safety standards and regulations, and the definition of guidelines and practices for the selection and use of OEs.

Human-robot collaboration in industrial applications is a challenging robotic task. Human working together with the robot at a workplace to complete a task may create unpredicted events for the robot, as humans can act unpredictably. Humans tend to perform a task in a not fully repetitive manner using their expertise and cognitive capabilities. The traditional robot programming cannot cope with these challenges of human-robot collaboration. In this paper, a framework for robot learning by multiple human demonstrations is introduced. Through the demonstrations, the robot learns the sequence of actions for an assembly task (high-level learning) without the need of pre-programming. Additionally, the robot learns every path as needed for object manipulation (low-level learning). Once the robot has the knowledge of the demonstrated task, it can perform the task in collaboration with the human. However, the need for adaptation of the learned knowledge may arise as the human collaborator could introduce changes in the environment, such as placing an object to be manipulated in a position and orientation different from the demonstrated ones. In this paper, a novel real-time adaptation algorithm to cope with these changes in the environment, introduced by the human factor, is proposed. The proposed algorithm is able to identify the sequence of actions needed to be performed in a new environment. A Gaussian Mixture Model-based modification algorithm is able to adapt the learned path in order to enable robot to successfully complete the task without the need of additional training by demonstration. The proposed framework copes with changes in the position and orientation of the objects to be manipulated and also provides obstacle avoidance. Moreover, the framework enables the human collaborator to suggest different sequence of actions for the learned task, which will be performed by the robot. The proposed algorithm was tested on a dual-arm industrial robot in an assembly scenario and the results are presented. Shown results demonstrate a potential of the proposed robot learning framework to enable continuous human-robot collaboration.

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