Abstract:Virtual reality (VR) has the potential to substantially alter the manner in which products of the future are engineered. Currently there are many applications of VR during the product engineering process from design and analysis through to process planning, assembly, machining and shop floor layout. VR takes a multitude of forms, including immersive, desktop, augmented, and is rapidly developing as a tool that can be used in the engineering of products.This paper looks at the use of immersive VR as a tool for analyzing both design and manufacturing product engineering activities in a series of research projects involving assembly planning and cable harness design. It focuses particularly on the use of the non-intrusive logging of users in such environments as a means to obtaining a rich data source for activity analysis and its potential within computer integrated manufacturing environments as a means of providing downstream engineering data.
In recent years there have been moves in industrial engineering towards greater automation through intelligent systems and this has resulted in replacing human expertise. In many cases the potential of intelligent systems has yet to be realised. This paper presents and discusses an alternative technological approach, which uses immersive virtual reality (VR) to support engineering design tasks. The approach focuses on the human engineer and acknowledges the importance of human input to the design process. The development of a metaphor based VR system is reported along with initial field trials, which compare VR with conventional CAD systems. The results show advantages of using VR over CAD and these are discussed along with strengths, weaknesses and future work.
Bundles of cables known as harnesses are an essential and costly but often overlooked feature of electromechanical systems. This paper describes the problems and diculties associated with cable harness design and planning and reviews published material on the subject. A case study approach involving a number of advanced manufacturing organizations was used to con®rm current industrial practice. Cable harness design and planning is revealed to comprise a sequential, iterative set of lengthy activities carried out late in the overall product development cycle. It was found that there has been little attempt to integrate any of the core activities involved. The paper concludes with a proposal for a new concurrent engineering approach to cable harness design that makes use of an immersive virtual environment within which stages in the process can be addressed.
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