Santhi Balaraman’s research while affiliated with Indian Institute of Science Bangalore and other places

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Publications (2)


Automated identification of distinct events in an assembly process using tracking of body postures
  • Article

December 2017

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69 Reads

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5 Citations

Concurrent Engineering Research and Applications

Santhi Balaraman

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An ergonomic assembly process is safer for operators and is more efficient in quality, time, cost and productivity. An assembly process is carried out in a series of distinct events. Ergonomic assessment of an assembly process therefore involves identification of the distinct events within the process and assessment of difficulty in carrying out each event, so that the process can be improved in an event-specific manner. So far, such assessment of assembly is carried out using video by identifying key frames manually. Manual identification of key frames consumes more time. To resolve this drawback, a novel approach has been proposed for tracking the body segments using electromagnetic trackers. It is done automatically in real time. Then, a data smoothening method is used for analysing automatically the tracked data to identify distinct events in an assembly process. An experiment in a laboratory setting is used in this study to test the following hypothesis: ‘An event is characterized by gross movements at its beginning and its end’. This hypothesis encapsulates the essence of the signature in postural data, which is used by the proposed method for identifying distinct events within an assembly; the tracked data were used to identify this signature automatically from the trackers and the tracked data set with a threshold of movement for each body segment; using this threshold, gross motions and thereby starts and ends of distinct events can be identified. The method of identifying events was based on a reach experiment; thus, the variation of torso angle was studied in this work. The result of the study indicates that this method can be applied easily in detecting events in an assembly. Performance of the proposed method is compared with the traditional method and it is observed that the proposed approach outperforms traditional method in terms of time and accuracy.


A Real Time Automatic Ergonomic Measure in Identifying Postural Deviation for the Assessment of Manual Assembly

February 2017

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101 Reads

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1 Citation

Smart Innovation

For real-time ergonomic applications, it is essential to track body data and perform real-time data analysis, for detecting postural deviations and possible ergonomic difficulties. This paper presents a setup that uses a body tracking system for automated, real-time postural data collection during an assembly task, for use in ergonomic studies. An analysis of the tracked data in developing a measure for assemblability assessment is also presented. A case study of a standing posture assembly, which involved inserting a threaded bolt into a threaded hole in a peg board, is used for the analysis. During the assembly task, postural data of operators is tracked automatically and analysed for angular variations in time, which is then compared with the benchmarks provided by RULA. The time taken in various postures across the activities is also compared. The results show that variation in the torso angle can be taken as a potential measure for assessing reach difficulty in assembly.

Citations (1)


... Thus, this study aims to develop an algorithm to overcome both measurement errors and time consumption for continuous postural analysis; meanwhile, cost effectiveness and minor hardware dependency has been considered throughout this study in order to make the approach easier than current methods for further research studies. Many researchers applied new techniques to keep track of the location and orientation of body parts automatically [17,[21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32]. These approaches will help them to evaluate body posture continuously, faster and more precise. ...

Reference:

A novel cost-effective postural tracking algorithm by using marker-based video processing
Automated identification of distinct events in an assembly process using tracking of body postures
  • Citing Article
  • December 2017

Concurrent Engineering Research and Applications