Designing cable harness assemblies in virtual environments

Ng, F. M.; Ritchie, James Millar; Simmons, John E.; Dewar, Rick

doi:10.1016/s0924-0136(00)00725-1

Cited by 47 publications

(38 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…An immersive VR cable harness design tool was developed for evaluation using industrial cable design experts which compared their performance against the same solutions generated in a variety of CAD Δ Δ environments. This cable design study involved a wide range of industrial partners who were investigated to determine a generic process for cable harness design (Ng et al 2000) and was used as a basis for the design of the eventual virtual cable harness design platform (figure 9). A VR-based toolset was produced as an experimental platform and concentrated on routing cables through a generic assembly representing the main sub-system of a product (figure 10).…”

Section: Gathering Data For Vr:cad Comparisons Via User Loggingmentioning

confidence: 99%

The role of non-intrusive operator logging to support the analysis and generation of product engineering data using immersive VR

Ritchie

Dewar

Robinson

et al. 2006

Virtual and Physical Prototyping

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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.

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Section: Gathering Data For Vr:cad Comparisons Via User Loggingmentioning

confidence: 99%

The role of non-intrusive operator logging to support the analysis and generation of product engineering data using immersive VR

Ritchie

Dewar

Robinson

et al. 2006

Virtual and Physical Prototyping

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Gomes de Sa and Zachmann (7) see a role for immersive VR throughout the whole product development cycle but it needs to be as easy to use as CAD. Fortunately, it tends to be easier to use than CAD, as discovered by Ng et al where the training times for using an immersive VR design system were much shorter (8). Cruz-Niera et al (9) used a C2 CAVE™ environment for architectural design so that students could appreciate a model at full scale and Weyrich and Drews (10) used a virtual workbench to design and found that the method appears to effectively support how engineers think during the design process.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Cable harness design, the chosen focus of this work, is a major, tail-end design activity and, even with extensive CAD-based packages available for this task, companies still employ physical prototypes to check cable paths (8). Early cable harness design work attempted to automate the choice of a cable harness route (14), with subsequent work using genetic algorithms to tackle the same problem (15).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Wolter and Krol routed 'strings' around 'solid' parts (16) and robot path planning has also been applied for pipe routing (17). Recent work at Heriot-Watt University (8,18) showed that immersive VR gives advantages in this design process. Iowa State University (19) used a VR system for routing flexible hoses and validated VR as a practical tool.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Work at Boeing (20) in the area of augmented reality indicated the early advantages of virtual technologies in assembling cable harnesses. A survey of the industrial companies showed that there was a need for human expert intervention to make fine adjustments and verify solutions (8); therefore it is timely to investigate the nature of new human-driven tools to support interaction with data in this domain. The key issue is the integration of the human-in-the-loop by treating the operator as integral to system (21).…”

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confidence: 99%

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Immersive Virtual Reality

Small¹

2008

Encyclopedia of Multimedia

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-In this paper, the use of head mounted display immersive virtual reality (VR) is investigated as both a cable harness design routing and an assembly planning tool. Due to the nature of this technology being more intuitive as an interface for generating design and process planning information, it is important to understand in detail the activities being carried out by the designer whilst immersed in the 3D virtual environment since health and safety recommendations dictate a maximum of around 20 minutes exposure for the user.After covering earlier work comparing CAD/VR productivity studies, follow-on work is outlined describing an immersive VR-based design platform developed for the design, assembly planning and installation planning of cable harnesses. This is presented in the form of recent, extensive system evaluations which analysed a number of participants carrying out cable routing design tasks. User activities were broken down using a novel design task categorisation scheme which enabled a detailed understanding of the design activity being carried out. This successfully illustrated where the designers were spending their valuable time being creative, generating design information, navigating through the model, correcting errors, accessing help information, etc. and, for the first time, allowed the system to be statistically evaluated in terms of performance and category relationships. The categorisation scheme provides a valuable formal tool for understanding design behaviour and could be used not only with immersive VR design systems but for comparing different design platforms such as CAD systems. As well as this, non-intrusive logging also enable assembly planner activities to be monitored and recorded; the subsequent analysis of this data enabled chronological cable harness assembly and cable harness installation plans to be automatically produced along with the incorporation of real-world estimates of assembly times. TECHNICAL PAPER -The use of interactive immersive virtual reality (VR) will become popular in the near future for the conceptual and detail design of new products, particularly within the car industry. The use of VR will probably mirror the use of CAD systems within this sector in the 1970s which became generally available for 2D drafting on on low-cost PCbased platforms and evolved into CAD systems with extensive real-time solid modelling capabilities. Also important is the generation of downstream information in the form of manufacturing and assembly plans. Since VR will be an significant competitive technology in industry it is important that its impact and application are understood so that interfaces and systems can be developed which substantially enhance the capabilities of both design and manufacturing engineers. This work focuses on head-mounted display (HMD) immersive VR being used as a tool for the design of cable harness routes and the subsequent automatic generation of harness assembly plans and installation plans. The main focus being on proving whether the engine...

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Virtual Environments — the Eco-Friendly Approach to Product Design?

Ritchie¹

Product Engineering

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Designing cable harness assemblies in virtual environments

Cited by 47 publications

References 8 publications

The role of non-intrusive operator logging to support the analysis and generation of product engineering data using immersive VR

The role of non-intrusive operator logging to support the analysis and generation of product engineering data using immersive VR

Immersive Virtual Reality

Virtual Environments — the Eco-Friendly Approach to Product Design?

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