Human-Robot Collaborative Omnidirectional Mobility for Picking Work Assistance : 1^st report: Proposal of the operational interface and its feasiblity study

This study aims to develop the omnidirectional mobility system with a hands-free interface to support walking in cooperation with picking operations with Autonomous mobile robots: AMR in a small warehouse. Currently, AMRs are used to transport goods in small warehouses. However, because many of these AMRs do not capabilities of picking items from shelves, the workers must pick up, load, and unload them. Resulting in the workers must walk between the shelves and the AMRs, which takes a load of work. In this study, we develop the omnidirectional mobility for the workers to shorten the walking distance in small warehouses. The proposed mobility has a sitting stand support for the worker to sit or stand easily. The worker boards the mobility with sitting on the stand, and operates the mobility in a hands-free state. To estimate this operational intention, the mobility uses the worker’s body movement and the position of the center of mass on the boarding surface. This information is measured by using strain gauges and load cells installed at the bottom of the sitting stand support. This paper presents the configuration of the user interface and investigates the feasibility of estimating the operational intention via body movements.