Assembly verification in digital mock-ups using force feedback

Virtual product creation will play a key role in industrial product development in the future. Creating a virtual prototype needs a verification of a collision free final place of all parts and a collision free path to it, the assembly path. This paper addresses the second point of this issue, because nowadays CAD software do not solve it. The DLR lightweight robot is used as a force feedback device together with a digital 3D Mock-Up (DMU), such that the human designer can explore the parts and their assembly paths with his kinesthetic skills in a natural way. This allows a faster and more reliable virtual product creation process while saving costly hardware Mock-Ups. We depict the components of a Virtual Reality System and a 6 degrees of freedom haptic rendering algorithm integrated into it. The advanced hardware and control architecture of the DLR lightweight robot is presented with regard to the use as force feedback device in real size assembly simulation. User tests in a practical scenario gave good results for the system.