Evaluating the Efficiency of Six-DoF Haptic Rendering-Based Virtual Assembly Training

Haptics plays an important role in training users to assemble mechanical components, such as airplane or car parts. Because mechanical components are often geometrically complex, efficient collision detection and six-DoF haptic rendering of contact are required for virtual assembly, and this has been extensively explored in prior work. However, as this article shows, this alone is not sufficient for efficient virtual assembly training. This article asks how to augment six-DoF haptic rendering of contact to maximize virtual assembly training efficiency, and proposes and measures several visual and haptic guidance strategies. Our visual strategies consist of displaying animations of the correct assembly path, motion indicator cues, and close-ups on difficult assembly path sections. Our haptic guidance consists of forces and torques that correct the trainee’s deviation from the path. We investigate several haptic guidance strategies, including continuous forces and torques, force/torque nudging and anti-forces/torques. We designed a user study to evaluate the training efficiency of our proposed strategies quantitatively, using ANOVA and Tukey statistics. Our main finding is that the most efficient training approach is to use haptic rendering of contact in combination with visual animation-based guidance. Continuous forces, nudging, anti-forces and motion indicator cues were measured to be less effective.