Enhancing fidelity of virtual assembly by considering human factors

Virtual assembly (VA) provides a crucial opportunity to enhance product design and manufacturing efficiencies, but it still has no generic method to enable realistic behaviors during the assembly process. The real assembly process is strongly affected by the human factors and leaving the human aspect out of the assembly planning could result in incorrect or inefficient operations; however, this point is seriously neglected in the existing VA systems. This article simulates the human factors involved in the assembly process and analyzes the influence of the human factors on assembly performance on the basis of our previously presented physics-based assembly method, in which the assembling part is guided by the assembly force and the physics of the interaction is simulated. Assembly operations are simulated in a virtual environment, and the human factors including the visibility of an assembling part, posture, reachability, and fatigue of an operator are quantified. The new calculation methods of the estimated final position and the assembly force are presented to perform a more realistic assembly operation. This algorithm has been applied to a self-developed desktop virtual assembly prototype system. An example is illustrated, and the results show that this assembly method taking the human factors into account provides a realistic simulation of the assembly operations in virtual space and realizes a high consistence between virtual and real assembly process.