[4-1600-D] Other Categories (1)

[4-1600-D-01] Applicability Of Japanese Standard About The Powered Exoskeleton To Agriculture

*Masahiro Tanaka¹, Satoru Umeno¹, Yutaka Kikuchi¹ (1. National Agriculture and Food Research Organization(Japan))

Keywords:Powered Exoskeleton, Labor-Saving technology, Assistive technology, ISO 13482, JIS B8456-1

In japan, various types of powered exoskeletons have been developed for long ago such as military, construction, transportation, manufacturing and agriculture and now some of them are in the market. They are expected to reduce a physical load on workers resulting from picking up heavy object or continuous working in a half-sitting posture for long time and free workers from these heavy labors because aging labor population has become a serious problem and elderly people and women have need to perform the heavy labors in Japan. For this reason, the robots coexisting with human that provide services to people and used in same space with human have been developed so far and now it is called service robot, which performs useful task for human and equipment excluding industrial automation applications. Furthermore, Japan proposed safety requirements for personal care robots that is a kind of service robots including powered exoskeleton to ISO and it was published as ISO 13482 on 2014. In this way, Japan is not only paying attention to developing but also establishment of standards about service robots. Especially regarding a powered exoskeleton for lumbar support, a Japanese national standard that specified safety and performance requirements was published as JIS B8456-1 developed from ISO 13482 on 2017. However, it needs to consider details in each field to widely spread through the market, because JIS B8456-1 was cross-cutting standard that summarized the minimum and common requirements in various fields. Therefore, we examined the applicability of this standard to agriculture and there were some problems as a result. Regarding safety requirements, it was considered necessary to identify particular risk factors of using a powered exoskeleton that have the potential to cause harm when farmer would use it in their farm work. Therefore, the authors summarized the risk assessment sheet about using a powered exoskeleton in farm work, so that estimated that unstable surfaces of ground might cause user falling down in particular. Regarding performance requirements, the test methods that measuring assistive torque a powered exoskeleton have were not suitable for agricultural use because it was only for static force however not for dynamic force. Accordingly, the authors developed a measuring instrument and test method for measuring the dynamic assistive torque in consideration of agricultural use. Furthermore, they examined the plasticity using a powered exoskeleton for farm work made in Japan. As a result, the dynamic assistive torque properties were revealed with high reproducibility and standard deviation of maximum and average assistive torque were lower than 1 N･m. the authors expect that risk assessment sheet and measuring instrument they developed can improve applicability of Japanese standard about the powered exoskeleton to agriculture.