Designing motion guides for ergonomic collaborative manipulation

Manual materials handling of heavy loads is a common cause of low back disorders. The manual manipulation of a heavy load may be made more comfortable by constraining the load to move along a guide. If the load is constrained the human operator can provide forces in directions that are comfortable while the frictionless guide directs the motion of the load to the goal configuration. We study the design of such motion guides for ergonomic materials handling. We formulate the problem and provide some example guides for planar manipulation. The motion guides may be implemented by fixed rail systems or by programmable constraint machines (cobots).