A general analytic approach for Santos™ upper extremity workspace

Workspace is an important function for human factors analysis and is widely applied in product design, manufacturing, and ergonomics evaluations. This paper presents a general analytic method to determine the upper extremity workspace for any percentile Santos™, a new virtual human developed at the University of Iowa with over 100 degrees of freedom (DOFs) that is highly realistic in terms of appearance, behavior, and movement. The joint limits are considered in this formulation; three types of singularities are analyzed. A real-time scheme is used to build the workspace library for Santos™ that will study the boundary surfaces offline and apply them to Santos™ in the virtual environment (Virtools®). To visualize the workspace, we develop a user interface to generate the cross-section of the reach envelope with a plane. This is the first step in investigating the zone differentiation that divides zones based on different human performance measures, and will be helpful in layout design and other human factors analysis.