Laboratory Surrogate Hammer-Drilling for Reproducible Testing of Design Effects

This paper evaluates laboratory surrogate hammer-drilling tasks to impose user load, and thus user strain, in a reproducible manner and comparable to hammer-drilling application. A six-axis industrial robot reproduces the key degrees of freedom of a representative snapshot of the drilling process, and user feedback is used to regulate the target load reproducibly across trials. The resulting measures are benchmarked against data from comparable hammer-drilling application studies. The selected task will be used in a future study for rapid, reproducible testing of power-tool design variants.