Making factories safer with VR, smart clothes and robots

Nissan’s factory in Sunderland exists in more than one world.

The car company is working with a local games manufacturer to create a digital version of its factory that can be explored in virtual reality. The idea is to make its workers safer in the real world.

The UK government estimates that 8.8 million working days were lost in 2016 owing to work-related musculoskeletal diseases. That’s things like back pain from lifting heavy items in the wrong way, or repetitive strain injury from making the same awkward movements over and over again.

Using HTC Vive headsets, Nissan can put workers on a virtual factory floor. “We can take advantage of the tracking data from the Vive and, based on your body position, we can chuck a virtual mannequin in there,” said Daniel Richardson, who works in research and development in Nissan’s information systems department, at the TechXLR8 conference in London in June.

This technology can help in the design of more ergonomic layouts for equipment, and make sure that safety features such as sight lines are maintained. Workers can also be trained on virtual equipment before they go out into the real factory.

This is not the only way the nature of manufacturing work is changing. In last month’s issue, we looked at how collaborative robots are allowing humans and machines to work side by side. But, according to Kaspar Althoefer, professor of robotics engineering at Queen Mary, University of London, “there is no guarantee that working with a robot is ergonomic over a long period”.

That’s what he wants to change. Althoefer’s team has developed lightweight garments with electromyography sensors built in. They measure the electrical signals being sent to the muscles to build a picture of how much force the body is exerting. Clothing offers a more practical alternative to the awkward wires and electrodes that usually need to be stuck in place and can limit natural movement.

The technology has applications in sport too. For instance, suggested Althoefer, it could lead to improved athletics tracks by measuring how the amount of force different muscles have to exert while running changes depending on the composition of the surface.

But his team wants to go a step further. “We can use robotic systems to create an ergonomic environment for the worker,” said Althoefer. The researchers equipped a collaborative robot with an Xbox Kinect camera, which can track body movements and provide information about the person’s overall posture. The robot’s screen can be set up to raise the alarm if the worker is in a non-ergonomic position for more than a second.

Some collaborative robots, such as the Sawyer unit used in Althoefer’s experiments, already have some ergonomic features. “It has force sensing built into the robot,” explained Jim Lawton of Rethink Robotics, which makes Sawyer. “They're detecting subtle movements in the movement of your hand – and it knows as a result where you're trying to move the robot and then it assists you.”

By adding in live data from the muscles, Althoefer’s team has now created a system that can automatically adjust to the user’s movements. So if the robot is holding a piece of metal the human is working on, the bot will move the metal around automatically to ensure that as little strain as possible is placed on the worker’s muscles. “The workpiece is now always reacting to the user,” said Althoefer. “The ideal scenario would be for the worker not to move around, and the piece to move around instead.”

In future, Althoefer hopes the technology could be used to create an objective scoring method for ergonomics that could be applied across a variety of industries. He sees particular potential in the area of neurosurgery. He predicts that, with industry backing, it could be available within five years. “I think there’s great advantages in our system,” he said. “First of all it’s very low cost, secondly it can be integrated into clothing. We could easily move forward and create actual products.”