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AnDy, the hi-tech suit that helps man work with robots

The first prototype of 'AnDy' is ready, the sensorized suit that monitors the posture and stress of the human body even during rapid and dynamic movements: designed to improve ergonomics in the workplace, it will send human movement data to robots so that they can work together to minimize muscle-skeletal stress and the risk of injuries.

Valuable also for athletes, the suit was developed by researchers of the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) coordinated by Dr.Daniele Pucci, recently awarded the MIT Innovators Under 35 Europe award. The AnDy project, funded by the European Union as part of the Horizon 2020 program, represents the first step towards creating technologies that allow machines to interact with people, thus obtaining collaborative industrial robots ('cobots'). Designed for this scenario, the hi-tech suit is equipped with 17 wearable commercial sensors , combined with innovative sensorized shoes designed, produced and calibrated by the IIT.

Thanks to dedicated algorithms, the information coming from the sensors allows to characterize human movements in less than a millisecond. The software infrastructure is also capable of simultaneously managing the analysis of the body of several people, allowing to reconstruct the position and movement of a group within an environment. The researchers of the IIT's Dynamic Interaction Control Lab in Genoa have validated these technologies in real scenarios where it is important to monitor body movements.

In the first scenario, the researchers ran on a treadmill to test the algorithms dedicated to real-time motion detection and the detection of forces and pressure; in the second scenario, they moved loads within a warehouse analyzing the position and stress on the human body's joints; in the last scenario, the researchers played a soccer match to test the functions of the suit in a dynamic situation.

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