Ergonomic job rotation strategy based on an automated RGB-D anthropometric measuring system

Ergonomic job rotation is a novel strategy to increase work efficiency and decrease work fatigue of the operators in manufacturing lines. In this paper, we proposed an automated anthropometric measuring system based on RGB-D camera and a job rotation strategy based on particle swarm optimization (PSO). The first training stage involved a series of 3D data-processing techniques to generate parametric models from scanning human database. The second stage can estimate the anthropometric measurements from the depth maps captured by RGB-D camera system. Finally, a novel job rotation strategy is proposed with PSO based on three target functions, which are designed to measure the work discomfort levels and risks. The experimental data is a real case which includes the operators of a quartz blanks manufacturing line. The experimental results show that our proposed system can effectively and dramatically reduce the average risk and decrease the number of operators who experienced either a high risk or a medium risk levels.