Collaborative Robot Assistant for the Ergonomic Manipulation of Cumbersome Objects Collaborative robotics refers to the cooperation between humans and machines and aims at improving productivity and at facilitating the worker in demanding tasks. The advantage of collaboration is to combine the superior cognitive and motor skills of the operator with the physical capabilities of the robots. This work presents a control strategy for the robotic manipulator to minimise the muscular fatigue of the human operator during the manipulation of bulky objects. The robot moves the workpiece so that the human is always operating close to hisher most natural and ergonomic posture. This way the risk of developing postures and movements inducing musculoskeletal disorders is minimised. A substantial reduction of the amplitude of the operator movements, without degrading the precision in fulfilling the task, has been registered in the experimental campaign.

Towards Ergonomic Control of Collaborative Effort in Multihuman Mobilerobot Teams In this paper, we propose a control framework for a multihuman and mobilerobot collaborative team, that takes into account the coworkersxe2x80x99 ergonomic requirements as well as the demand for high flexibility in the manufacturing industries. The new MObile Collaborative robotic Assistant (MOCA), which is composed of a lightweight manipulator arm, an underactuated hand, and a mobile platform driven by four omnidirectional wheels enabling mobility in the workspace, is able to accomplish multiple tasks in a wide area with a high level of adaptability. In addition, an ergonomics module to anticipate and mitigate the human risk factors by means of a multiobject optimisation is integrated into the framework to ensure human safety and improvement of working conditions. The main advantage of this approach is that MOCA can assist multiple human operators, reducing their physical risks, with fastadaptive capacities due to agile mobility and advanced interaction and manipulation. We validated the proposed method with an experiment simulating a simple manufacturing line which involves two subjects and the MOCA. The results demonstrate that the proposed framework is able to address multiworkersxe2x80x99 ergonomics with a high level of flexibility in the workplace.