Industrial Exoskeleton Technology: Classification, Structural Analysis, and Structural Complexity Indicator

In recent years, exoskeleton technology has become of interest to the industrial manufacturing sector. It offers a new approach to improving the quality of work, task effectiveness and productivity by combining human intelligence and dexterity with robotic or mechanical assistance. In this paper, we classify the industrial needs into three categories: awkward posture and movements, heavy workload manipulation, and assembly effort assistance. Examples from car manufacturing are used to illustrate the presented classification. Our literature review reveals 62 exoskeleton solutions with industrial potentials. We list them according to continent source, development status, mass, targeted body part support, actuation type, energy source, and the proposed industrial needs. By analysing existing devices, we highlight prominent issues related to their structure and actuation technology. User feedback and industrial expectations often converge to a similar consensus on issues such as device mass, actuation type and effort distribution. In addition, we conduct a primary structural analysis showing, for each exoskeleton, a kinematic diagram and connectivity graph. We demonstrate this approach on five arm support exoskeletons for comparison. Furthermore, we link the structural analysis with a novel indicator that can measure the degree of structural complexity of the exoskeletons. This work contributes to the classification and benchmarking of exoskeleton, an emerging sector with varied innovative designs.