All companies are obligated by law to employ and integrate people with disability into the workforce. Failure to hire a certain percentage of people with disability in your company could lead to hefty fines. But you may find that the integration of people with disability into your employee list may not be as easy as you would like.
That is why the development of collaborative robot technology sounds promising for differently-abled people in the future. By adopting collaborative robots technology in your company, you could employ more people with disability without the need for extra expenses.
In this article, we shall explore how the collaborative robot industry is assisting people with disability to enter and integrate into the labor market.
How Cobots Work with Differently Abled People
Collaborative robots make it easy for disabled people to familiarize themselves with new steps of production and perform assigned tasks. The collaborative robot renders assistance to people with disability as soon as they need it. In some instances, the robots perform some tasks with the workers to teach them specific movements- an exercise that gives the workers some rehabilitative benefits.
Collaborative robots and other assistive systems have also been used to integrate the elderly into the active workforce. For example, elderly and disabled workers may have difficulty picking tools in separate boxes when they assemble different tools and parts. Using the ‘pick by light’ approach alongside collaborative robots allows the workers to work with precision by highlighting the packages from which to pick.
Cobot technology further provides workers with additional cognitive support by directly projecting information about the work process into the workspace. The worker can then press a green light button when the task is completed to get to the next cycle.
The Context-Aware Assistive System (CAAS) gives elderly, and disabled workers feedback about their performance in real-time using motion data. The CAAS system has a kinetic depth camera that captures touch senses on workplace surfaces. It also has a leap motion that detects hand movements and a webcam to identify tools in use and parts being assembled.
The detected motions are compared against reference trajectories, and the information generated is used to adjust the worker’s production speed. The feedback can also be given in real-time to determine whether the worker’s slow pace is due to exhaustion or boredom.
Robots Designed for Use by People with Disability in Industries
Industries are now adapting the use of cobots alongside healthy and disabled workers. One of the essential safety measures to observe during human-robot collaboration is workers’ safety. However, this should not hinder intentional contact between the robots and workers. This safety aspect is vital when cobots work with human workers to transfer objects. Recent cobot technology ensures that the process is as easy and natural as possible.
It is important to note that workers with disabilities are more readily accepted when the end effector moves in a linear, predictable movement. That is why Cartesian robots are among the most accepted robots among the elderly and workers with disability.
Acceptance of Collaborative Robots among People with Disability
Recent research shows a promising future for using robots in industries with disabled workers. Not only can familiarization between a worker and a robot be achieved quickly, but the robot’s presence is also received with greater acceptance from the workers. Additionally, whether healthy, disabled, or elderly, human workers are not anxious about working closely with robots as long as all safety measures are observed.
Recent research also shows that the familiarization process between humans and robots takes a maximum of twenty minutes. However, suppose you wish to introduce robots to workers with special needs. In that case, a familiarization phase one day prior to the actualization of the plan is recommended because the elderly and some people with disability have a short attention span.
Moreover, people with disability are willing to use cobot technology to master tasks and increase their work speed. Most disabled workers also prefer to work with robots positioned close to them rather than robots positioned far away.
Robots for People with Disabilities
Robots are also valuable for helping people with disabilities move about when working. For example, the system presented by Graser in 2013 assists paraplegic people working in libraries in executing all books manipulation tasks. The AQUIAS project robots also assist people with disabilities in participating in manufacturing processes by having the robots execute tasks that require a lot of physical strength while the worker performs operations like quality control.
Robots are also helpful to workers with a disability because of their rehabilitative use. Although the context is different, the ideas can be transferred to disabled workers to rehabilitate lower or upper limbs in the industry.
However, the robots used to execute these tasks are slightly modified, i.e., exoskeletons to rehabilitate the legs and arms of paralyzed individuals. For example, the Armin II exoskeleton of ETH Zurich Institute is used to rehabilitate the hands, enabling the user to use their upper limbs to perform various activities such as playing virtual games or performing repetitive tasks that do not require a lot of movements.
For example, when a person using the Armin II is playing a game involving them guiding their hand through a virtual labyrinth, the robot exerts a force to correct the hand’s position when the hand is no longer centered on the labyrinth path. This helps the worker to learn how to move his hand correctly.
Conclusion
A large percentage of people with disability are not represented in the workforce. However, their physical disability should not be the cause of their alienation from the crew at a time when technology is advancing. Collaborative robots are designed to work alongside human beings, not only to assist them in executing tasks but also to rehabilitate them. You can therefore employ and empower more people living with disability by using collaborative robots to enable these workers to execute complex tasks as well as healthy people.
