Haptic Interaction in Virtual Reality Environments for Manual Assembly Validation

Based on an increased level of product complexity in product development processes new technologies and validation approaches are researched and applied in industry to validate assembly processes. Especially technologies that are focusing on Mixed or Virtual Reality environments are getting very popular in the field of assembly validation, because of a huge potential to reduce the necessary number of physical prototypes. Therefore costs and time within product integration phase can be saved. These technologies can provide a high level of immersion for pick-and place or assembly tasks and allow a scale 1:1 interaction with the future product or production system. Still plenty of limitations for a complete substitution of physical prototypes exist due to the lack of physical and haptic behavior of these virtual prototypes. Within this paper, a development method and applications for haptic interaction with force-feedback devices for assembly validation is presented. Focusing especially on the development process of a mixed prototype with virtual and physical elements, so called hybrid prototypes, a hard- and software framework is presented. Nowadays virtual assembly methods for Virtual Reality and computer haptics are still based on a high level of expertise in providing technology and testbeds. To keep a high level of flexibility regarding virtual validation models, easily applicable procedures for modelling, im-/exporting and configuration of the prototype are needed for a virtual assembly use case. In this paper, a new and connected processing pipeline is presented that describes and guides a non-expert user from CAD environment to the implementation and configuration of prototypes for haptic interaction.