In recent years, exoskeleton technology has become of interest to the industrial manufacturing sector. It offers a new approach to improving the quality of work, task effectiveness and productivity by combining human intelligence and dexterity with robotic or mechanical assistance. In this paper, we classify the industrial needs into three categories: awkward posture and movements, heavy workload manipulation, and assembly effort assistance. Examples from car manufacturing are used to illustrate the presented classification. Our literature review reveals 62 exoskeleton solutions with industrial potentials. We list them according to continent source, development status, mass, targeted body part support, actuation type, energy source, and the proposed industrial needs. By analysing existing devices, we highlight prominent issues related to their structure and actuation technology. User feedback and industrial expectations often converge to a similar consensus on issues such as device mass, actuation type and effort distribution. In addition, we conduct a primary structural analysis showing, for each exoskeleton, a kinematic diagram and connectivity graph. We demonstrate this approach on five arm support exoskeletons for comparison. Furthermore, we link the structural analysis with a novel indicator that can measure the degree of structural complexity of the exoskeletons. This work contributes to the classification and benchmarking of exoskeleton, an emerging sector with varied innovative designs.

Manual material handling is one of the most frequent operations in industrial manufacturing processes. To avoid undesirable spinal loads, workers are often required to use external aid devices. This paper presents the analysis and design concept of a wearable assistive device for reducing the spinal loads during lifting tasks. A simplified model is used to compare the effects of two possible configurations for the device: the application of a force (a) parallel and (b) perpendicular to the spine. The model suggests that the perpendicular configuration (b) is preferable to (a). A subsequent numerical analysis suggests that the assistive device reduces substantially the spinal compression. This paper also discusses the design of a hardware prototype, that allows the operator to move mostly unhindered while performing lifting tasks. In particular the leg and torso movements on the sagittal plane are covered by the 90% and 60% respectively, while the movements on the frontal plane are fully covered.

Industrial wearable exoskeletons can assist the workers during manual handling of loads at manufacturing facilities. Today, one of their design challenges is to reduce weight so the worker can wear them for an extended length of time, without compromising torque and power requirements. Actuators can largely contribute to the overall weight of such devices. An elastic element in parallel can reduce the technical specifications of the actuator. However, such elastic elements are heavy with a large footprint. We present an innovative Parallel Elastic Actuator (PEA) using an elastic cord made of natural rubber elastomer, which can store energy during lowering and release it while lifting. Trunk exoskeleton requirements are analysed based on human subject data for industrial lowering and lifting scenarios. The mechanical design concept of a PEA for the hip joint of an industrial exoskeleton is discussed in detail. We formulate the mathematical model of the human-exoskeleton motion in the sagittal plane. We perform the virtual testing on industrial lowering and lifting scenarios to verify the actuator performance. The results show the improvement in weight, peak torque and peak power by 20%, 50% and 40% respectively as compared with the current prototype. The new integrated actuator consists of the direct current (DC) motor, the harmonic drive (HD) and the parallel natural rubber elements which reduce size and complexity of the trunk exoskeleton.