Development of an assistance robot in a hot forging work site and its performance evaluations

Forging is one of the foundational techniques for manufacturing mechanical components of mechanisms and machines. Forging factories produce essential elements which are being used in every part of the mechanical industry. But working environment of forging factories has noise, vibration, dust, etc. Because of these poor working conditions, accidents occur frequently. Moreover, the tasks in hot forging processes gives a lot of fatigue to the workers. This fatigue mainly occurs due to handling of the heavy products. Therefore, in this paper, we present development of an assistance robot for hot forging industry. Purpose of the robot is to compensate gravity-load for heavy products. To verify the functionality of the robot, we performed a muscle fatigue analysis using Electromyography (EMG) signals. Four muscles of the upper extremity were chosen to measure muscle activity. Experiment conditions were setup to imitate the hot forging process. Post experimental analysis of the captured muscle activity revealed reduction in median frequency of the EMG signals, which means clear fatigue reduction due to the robot´s assist. The developed assistance robot with compact and economical components can be efficiently utilized at forging work sites for better working conditions of an operator.