Development of a haptic virtual reality system for assembly planning and evaluation

Virtual reality systems can be used to simulate, analyze and optimize manufacturing processes including assembly. Haptic technologies enable the user to feel the force feedback from the virtual environment, leading to a more intuitive and natural way to simulate the assembly process during the design phase of new components even before any physical prototype is created. This paper presents the development of a haptic virtual reality platform to perform, plan and evaluate virtual assemblies of components. The system allows real-time manipulation and interaction of virtual components. Physics simulation engines are used to enable physic based behavior and collision detection of virtual objects in the virtual environment. One of the outstanding characteristics of the proposed platform is that the user can modify various simulation parameters during run-time, such as the weight of virtual objects, model representation algorithm and the physics simulation engine being used, which is very important in order to evaluate the influence of each parameter on the performance of virtual assembly tasks.