RoboMate Project: Development of intelligent and wearable body exoskeleton

The Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering IAO is partner in the Robo-Mate project, starting in September 2013. 

Together with 11 European partners this research project aims at designing a human-guided exoskeleton to improve work safety and enhance productivity in the industrial environment.

Various manual work tasks necessary to industrial manufacturing processes are difficult to automate – even today – due to their complexity.

This is particularly the case in assembling and dismantling operations, such as those used in the automotive or food processing industries. This type of work, however, entails severe risks of injury.

According to the Work Foundation Alliance (UK), as many as 44 million workers in the European Union are affected by work-place related musculo-skeletal disorders (MSDs), representing a total annual cost of more than 240 billion Euros.

To overcome these industrial and societal challenges, a new project, called RoboMate, has been designed.

Set to get underway in September 2013, the objective of the RoboMate project is to develop an intelligent, easy-to-manoeuvre, and wearable body exoskeleton for manual-handling work.

The project comprises 12 partners from 7 European countries, including key players from industry and academia.

The fundamental idea behind Robo-Mate is to enhance work conditions for load workers and facilitate repetitive lifting tasks, thereby reducing the incidence of work-place related injury and disease.

As a consequence, productivity, flexibility and the quality of production will increase. Bringing this concept to fruition involves merging human-guided manipulators with computer-controlled industrial robots in order to create a human-guided and computer-supported exoskeleton for use in various industries.

The development includes modelling and simulating the exoskeleton in a virtual-factory environment at the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering IAO.

Putting the Robo-Mate exoskeleton into service will engender practical and far-reaching impacts, including making the industrial work-site safer for skilled personnel, providing a means for workers to apply less physical effort, and facilitating higher-quality outputs resulting in industrial benefit.

RTOG and Highly-focused stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT)

Highly-focused stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT) can eliminate the targeted tumor while avoiding treatment-related illness and may ultimately improve survival for patients with inoperable non-small cell lung cancer, according to early findings of a Radiation Therapy Oncology Group (RTOG) study published in the March, cancer-themed, issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT) is a noninvasive cancer treatment in which numerous small, highly focused, and accurate radiation beams are used to deliver potent doses in 1 to 5 treatments to tumour targets.

"The primary finding and perhaps most exciting aspect to this prospective study was the high rate of primary tumour control (97.6 percent at 3 years). Primary tumour control is an essential requirement for the cure of lung cancer.

Stereotactic body radiation therapy as delivered in RTOG 0236 provided more than double the rate of primary tumour control previous reported for conventional radiotherapy suggesting that this technique could provide a significant step forward in the battle against this type of lung cancer," said Robert Timmerman, MD, of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, principal investigator on the RTOG study.

Currently, patients with inoperable early stage lung cancer are generally offered conventional radiation treatment (most commonly given during 20-30 outpatient treatments) or observed without specific cancer therapy. However, study authors indicate that neither of these approaches achieves ideal outcomes.