Operator 5.0: Enhancing the Physical Resilience of Workers in Assembly Lines

The human factor represents the most fragile and valuable resource in modern and low-standardized manufacturing environments. Indeed, the Operator 5.0 concept aims at achieving socially-inclusive workplaces by monitoring the well-being of workers during production cycles. To accomplish this challenging aim, this manuscript proposes a digital industrial Internet-of-Things architecture to monitor the physical resilience of Operator 5.0 in assembly lines. While a markerless motion capture camera is adopted to evaluate the ergonomic exposure, a superficial electromyography wearable acquires muscular contractions of upper limbs to perform a machine learning-based recognition of fatigue status. In this preliminary investigation, the main focus of the analysis is to digitize the European Assembly Worksheet to evaluate the worker’s postures during the assembly of home furniture. Exploiting such ergonomic measurements, a Monte Carlo-based sensitivity analysis is leveraged to evaluate the noise in bending scenarios. Finally, a reference system is leveraged to assess the measurement error of the motion capture camera.

I. Introduction

The manufacturing sector is a pivotal contributor to the European economy, accounting for 14.5% of the block Gross Domestic Product [1]. To gain competitive advantages in modern markets, manufacturing companies embraced Industry 4.0 paradigm resulting in high degrees of high process flexibility [2]. However, in recent years, industries are facing several challenges from supply chain shortages to youth unemployment and aging societies. In this regard, Industry 4.0 enabling factors lack key design and performance dimensions to achieve Europe’s 2030 goals. To overcome such limitations, the Industry 5.0 vision aims at designing human-centric smart resilient manufacturing systems that exploit Industrial Internet-of-Things (IIoT) technologies and machine learning (ML) based methods [3]. Therefore, the Operator 5.0, given human fragility, is monitored and complemented by digital technologies to safeguard his or her self-resilience given and ensure well-being in the long term.