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Abstract-This study develops a power assist suit (PAS) to assist laborers in agricultural work. This device is expected to reduce the strain produced by heavy agricultural work. During grape cultivation, pruning fruits in a posture, where workers have to keep their arms raised continuously, imposes a heavy burden on the workers including elderly. The objective of the PAS is to reduce the fatigue involved in the fruit pruning task by mounting a motor and spring-assisted mechanism on the suit. Quantifying the degree of fatigue reduction during agricultural work was necessary while developing the PAS. In this study, the surface electromyography (EMG), amount of energy expended, and exercise intensity were measured for motions similar to those involved in the shelf work in grape cultivation to verify the effects of reducing labor while wearing a PAS for agricultural work. The results demonstrated that the PAS developed for agricultural work could effectively reduce labor during static motions, such as maintaining postures.Index Terms-Power assist suit, agricultural work, surface EMG, energy expenditure, heart rate reserve.

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in 1985, and became an associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1991. He has been a professor in the system control engineering unit, Polytechnic University of Japan since 2015. His research interests include system control and smart automation. Prof. Takahashi is a member of SICE, IEEJ, IEICE, and RSJ.

Abstract-Agricultural power assist suits (PAS) have been developed and researched in our laboratory. In this study, the performance of a PAS is evaluated without burdening subjects through kinetic simulation. According to the formula for deriving energy consumption, the ratio of the energy consumption to the joint torque is same. Therefore, the joint torque of the knee is derived to investigate the influence of kinetic simulation the on femur. According to kinetic simulation, a PAS can reduce energy consumption. Further, the performance of PAS can be extracted by adjusting size. The validity of simulation is evaluated by comparing with other results. The simulation results and dynamics calculations agree well, but the actual measurements of some subjects show differences. The factors considered are the measurement error of the joint angle, difference in the position for pasting the electrode to measure the myopotential, and the asymmetry of muscle tension. Differences with considerable errors were observed for some test subjects in comparison with actual values, but a good match was observed for the case in which the PAS was worn for those test subjects that also showed a good match for the case without the PAS.