Ergowear: an ambulatory, non-intrusive, and interoperable system towards a human-aware human-robot collaborative framework

Abstract

Motivated by industry 5.0 paradigm and Human-robot collaboration (HRC) technology, this paper presents the first steps of the design and development of Ergowear, a wearable, non-intrusive, interoperable upper body inertial Motion Capture system. This system was developed aiming to be used as a sensing technology to make the robot aware of the human's intentions and states and, therefore, achieving human-Awareness. Consequently, it was developed to run on ROS2, to ease its integration in a HRC framework. This work depicts the design process and development of the prototype. Firstly, the system requirements are presented along with the system components and architecture. To verify interoperability, a protocol was designed to test the Ergowear's hardware, namely its autonomy, storing capacity, wireless communication's performance, and overall mechanical robustness. Overall, the achieved results are within the specified technical requirements, presenting the Ergowear as a promising sensing technology to be integrated within a Human-Aware HRC framework.