Sharing and bridging information in a collaborative virtual environment: Application to ergonomics

Abstract

The current paper aims at presenting a collaborative virtual environment usable to conduct ergonomic design sessions, involving the worker, ergonomists and engineers. The paper focuses particularly on the representation of the ergonomic evaluation and the interaction between an ergonomist and the main user (worker). An ergonomic evaluation of the postures is presented. An interaction architecture between the main user and an ergonomist based on the combination of animation modes of two linked manikins is also proposed. Preliminary results and future developments of the CVE (e.g. additional ergonomic evaluation tools, graphical enhancement, interaction enhancement,...) are then presented.

Collaborative virtual environments for ergonomics: embedding the design engineer role in the loop

“…Currently, the final user chooses manually a color -green, yellow and red-to indicate if the volume he draws is respectively easily reachable, moderately reachable or hardly reachable. We can think that in a near future, reachable volumes can be colored automatically on the basis of postural scores as they are calculated in [15] with a green-to-red color scale, indicating automatically which part of the reachable volume is the most comfortable for the final user. The ergonomist can then use this information with regard to all the available specifications on the process and the workstation, in order to help the engineer to make a decision about the final position of the workstation's element.…”

“…At last the final user warrants that the workstation is adapted to his morphological and physical features according to the task to complete. In a previous paper, we explored ways to share and bridge properly information between the ergonomist and the final user in a collaborative ergonomics design session [15]. In the current contribution, our aim is to properly define the role, duties and metaphors that are mandatory to involve design engineers in such sessions.…”

VR-based operating modes and metaphors for collaborative ergonomic design of industrial workstations

“…This task is achieved thanks to an analysis, either online or offline, of objective and subjective criterions quantifying the physical risk factors as Rated Perceived Exertion [7], Postural Scores [20,31] or Averaged Muscle Activations [9,38]. In the CVE, as it has been proposed in [40], the ergonomist can interact with the scene and the other actors using a specific interface. In the following study, the ergonomist's role has not been taken into account because we considered evaluating the specific interaction between the end-user and the design engineer.…”

“…Nevertheless, offering an opportunity to distant users to interact with each other implies the development of new information representation and new interaction metaphors. These metaphors correspond to the specific modes of ergonomic evaluation and design that can be realized in a collaborative way [14,40,41]. It also requires that the CVE architecture correctly handles the multiple shared representations of the same information [33].…”

When Model Driven Engineering meets virtual reality: Feedback from application to the Collaviz framework

“…The application described in [16], which deals with communication between an end-user and an ergonomist in order to enhance the design of an industrial workstation, has been built using the tools described in this paper. This is a "real" example of a new 3D application, with the addition to the Collaviz framework of 38 new Java interfaces and 48 new Java classes, which represents 8873 lines of Java code.…”