Knowledge Capture inside a Haptic Soldering Environment

In the electronics manufacturing industry, soldering plays a key role in the process, whether it is carried out manually, semi-automatically or fully automatically. Even though the basic techniques in manual soldering are comparatively straightforward, to master it at a high level still requires a lot of time and effort. The research presented in this paper aims to identify the motor skills involved in soldering and the ability to recognise when a soldering process is likely to go wrong. If this soldering knowledge was able to be captured, this would allow the development of automated soldering processes that work more efficiently. By simulating the manual soldering process in a haptics environment, the aim is to employ automated user logging to investigate human hand dexterity and learn how novices and experts operate differently. A pilot study was conducted to compare users carrying out a basic soldering task in real-life and in the haptic environment. By automated parsing of the logfiles obtained from the soldering sessions, important user actions were extracted and formalised using several knowledge representations. Future work will involve developing a more sophisticated haptics environment and to conduct a more intensive user trial involving more users.