Evaluation of a Haptic Environment for Assembly Task Simulation

A new application for virtually simulating assembly tasks was developed by integrating multimodal data and kinematic information provided by a mobility module into a Collaborative Virtual Environment. During assembly simulations, the haptic device implemented in the application supports the user's movements by using the automatically detected kinematic constraints between the components of the assembly. Thus, all stages of the assembly process can be simulated, which leads to an increase of the user immersion. The current paper presents the methodology, the protocols and the results of evaluating the application, the test being performed by a group of 20 participants. Tasks were run for assessing the following criteria: usability, efficiency, ease of use and quality of the haptic feedback. Each participant tested the application for two types of assemblies (mounting flange and standard vise) with different complexity and number of components. Testing protocols considered both objective evaluation (using real-time information), as well as subjective evaluation using questionnaires. The analysis of the results proved the feasibility of the proposed approach. Further work will be focused on extensive studies for assessing intra-users variations and improvement of the haptic feedback for a number of particular situations reported by users as important.