Manual Assembly Training in Virtual Environments

Abstract

The objective of this research is to build and demonstrate a design tool in a Virtual Reality (VR) environment. The goal of the tool is to streamline the assembly planning of complex systems. As a case study, we have generated a virtual reality environment for an assembly simulation of a zero-G treadmill for use on spacecraft. This study will help to understand the assembly of the VR model that might lead an assembler to optimize the design related costs. The VR environment has been created using Unity 3D along with Solidworks for creating models of Treadmill parts. A series of controlled user studies has been done to investigate the role of different visual cues (image and text) on user performance while performing manual assembly in an immersive VR setting (VIVE headset) and a non-immersive environment (desktop). To calculate the groundtruth, an optimized path sequences is computed using a genetic algorithm for a collision free layout.