A Virtual Environment for Interactive Assembly Planning and Evaluation

Abstract An interactive synthetic environment is presented which allows direct use of geometric component models and hierarchical assembly data in assembly planning and evaluation. The system allows the human designer to exploit inherent knowledge of assembly ordering, design parallelism, and other assembly factors to evaluate and visualize candidate assembly plans. The designer interacts with both geometric and abstract representations of the assembly using virtual environment peripherals such as a head-coupled display, six-degree-of-freedom trackers, and an instrumented glove. The system addresses several problems inherent in algorithmic assembly planning.