Beschreibung

A 15 kg crate, lifted several hundred times a shift between knee and shoulder height. That is one working day at a picking or packing station, and it is the load profile the LU 20 was built for. At stations of this type, sickness rates run above 25 per cent, fatigue costs around 10 per cent of output, and 8 per cent of positions sit vacant. A site can lose up to €1 million a year to that combination. Automating the work rarely pays, because load geometry, packaging and sequence change from pallet to pallet.

The LU 20 is an active exoskeleton for back and arms. A motor unit in a backpack housing transmits force through cables to the forearms and upper body: up to 20 kg in total, 10 kg per arm. The operator sets strength and speed in stages at the control panel. The system weighs about 5 kg on a carry system developed with Deuter and goes on in under a minute once someone has been shown how. Batteries come from the Makita XGT 40V max range, so a site can draw on the pool it already keeps for power tools. Eight hours of runtime, swapped hot, covers three shifts.

The LU 20 began as a research question at the Chair of Ergonomics at TU Munich. Eight years of work and more than 200 workplace visits later, over 200 people have worn it. According to pilot customers, it is the first exoskeleton their staff are glad to put on.

Innovationen

Active exoskeletons in this class support the lumbar region. The LU 20 supports arms, shoulders and back at once, from a single motor unit and cable transmission, with up to 20 kg of relief and a maximum of 10 kg per arm.
Assistance does not stop when the lift ends. It continues while the load is carried, held and set down, which is where most warehouse handling time actually goes.
Between assisted lifts the system follows the operator. Scanning a label, opening a carton, pulling a pallet truck or reaching into a rack all happen unimpeded.
At roughly 5 kg it is about 2 kg lighter than the nearest active competitor, and the Deuter carry system spreads that weight across forearms, shoulders, back and hips. Wearers report barely noticing it.
Fitting takes under a minute after instruction. Force and speed are adjusted in stages on the control panel, without tools.
The battery is a standard Makita XGT 40V max cell rather than a proprietary pack. Hot-swapped, it gives eight hours and runs three shifts.
EMC and ESD were cleared at the first attempt, with no findings and no revision of the boards. On a wearable this matters more than on a machine: an interruption means the assistance disappearing while someone is holding a load, not a device rebooting. Warehouses are electrically hostile — forklifts, motors, scanners, industrial WLAN.
Body-contact textiles are exchangeable and machine washable, one set per regular wearer. That is what makes shared use across three shifts hygienical.

Marktrelevanz

More than two million people in the European Union lift and carry for a living every day. It is one of the largest bodies of manual work left in Europe and one of the least digitised, with an estimated €55 billion of potential for ergonomic assistance and human-centred automation.

The work sits in order picking, parcel handling, loading and unloading, in-house transport, machine feeding, repositioning, sorting and the assembly of heavy components. Last-mile delivery, freight forwarding and maintenance follow behind.

What is bought is a workstation, not a company licence. The core target is a site with 6 to 50 demanding handling positions across one to three locations: a logistics operation of 100 to 300 people, or a plant of 1,000 to 5,000. Larger networks start with a proof of concept of five to ten devices.

Three things push the decision. Around 30 per cent of the workforce at these stations retires within five years and few replacements are coming. PostG §73(2) obliges German postal and parcel operators to reduce individual load significantly, so they either buy technical aids or double up the staffing. And contract logistics providers carry customer innovation requirements of roughly 3 per cent, which means showing an ergonomic measure when the contract comes up for renewal, usually in the 18 months beforehand.

Sales run through certified partners, currently ProHandling and exoskelette.gmbh (N-IPPIN GmbH), both of whom advise, lend test devices and sell in Germany.

Kundennutzen

Up to 20 kg comes off the arms, shoulders and back, 10 kg per arm at most, through the lift, the carry and the set-down. The assistance force reduces what the body bears. The weight of the object itself does not change.Per equipped station, the model is a 30 per cent fall in sick leave, worth roughly €12,000 in avoided cost, and a 10 per cent reduction in fatigue, worth roughly €10,000 in recovered output. Against a purchase price of €8,990, that pays back in about a year. Site managers and logistics managers can usually approve €5,000 to €20,000 themselves and want payback inside 12 to 24 months.Whether people keep wearing a device comes down to three things: how heavy it is, how long it takes to put on, and whether it gets in the way of everything else. The LU 20 is built against those three, at about 5 kg, under a minute, and no restriction on secondary tasks. The internal benchmark is 80 per cent of the crew still wearing it after four weeks.Hot-swap batteries keep three shifts running without a stop. Under a service agreement, an equivalent replacement unit arrives within five working days in Germany, seven elsewhere in the EU.
Introduction is structured. One day of workshop with staff, management, occupational safety, occupational medicine and the works council, then 2.5 days on site with wearing times stepped up from two hours to four to eight, and KPIs recorded with and without the device.