A System for Collaborative Assembly Simulation and User Performance Analysis

The increasing popularity of Virtual Reality for serious applications has raised the need for collaborative applications in virtual environments. In industry, Virtual Reality solutions are well-suited, e.g., for assembly design and assembly training scenarios. However, assessing the quality of assembly designs and the performance of assemblers is a nontrivial task and typically requires the collaboration of multiple agents in a virtual environment. In this paper, we present a concept and implementation of a comprehensive system for the design, training, and analysis of assembly sequences. The system allows experts to collaboratively review and analyse an assembly sequence and gives assemblers an environment to train and analyse their performance in collaboration with their trainer. The analysis is fostered by providing spatial and time-dependent metrics assessing the quality of an assembly performance. We devise and investigate different metrics and evaluate their suitability for reflecting training progress and performance.