Development of an Agricultural Arm Support Suit Which Requires No Power Source

Abstract

Fruit farmers often need to keep their arms raised continuously for cultivating or harvesting fruits, and Japanese fruit farmers are rapidly aging. In this paper, we propose a new agricultural arm support suit. This arm support suit easily locks the user's shoulder joints by pushing the support suit's levers and continues to support the user's arms. To unlock is also easy. This support suit was developed by integrating only passive mechanical elements without batteries, actuators, or controllers. Therefore, this support suit is essentially safe. Since batteries are not required, there are no battery problems such as the limitation of the time to use and the maintenance. First, we describe the features of this arm support suit. Second, we illustrate the structure and mechanism of the support suit. Third, we introduce the developed support suit. Finally, we provide experimental results to evaluate the effectiveness of the developed arm support suit.