Research on concurrent assembly in virtual environment

Cooperation is a critical and the most difficult task in virtual assembly. Since the participants could not perceive reliably in virtual environment like that in real reality, many accurate assembly tasks seemed like impossible to be accomplished only by the means of human direct manipulation. This paper presents a strategy and algorithms to solve the problem of concurrent assembly. Active object and computation-based perception mechanism are used. Object's behavior in virtual assembly is analyzed in detail and object trace is constructed. Concurrent assembly process is formally described based on object trace. Practice shows that the accurate assembly task is well supported by the concurrent algorithm, and the participants' burden is sharply reduced.