Experiments of assembly planning in virtual environment

This paper deals with the design of a 3D synthetic environment in which human operator can perform assembly operation in the same way as in real world (RW). The objective is to evaluate the product assemblability and refine the product design before launching its manufacture. The long term objective is to evaluate the product assembly/disassembly time, hence its cost at the design stage in order to support production planning and to determine the financial commitment associated with the product maintenance before its manufacture. To validate the virtual environment (VE) so that quantitative and qualitative information, such as relating to assembly planning activity can be derived from the interaction of the operator with virtual world, we suggest a validation technique based on the evaluation of the operator performance in terms of the generated assembly sequences in real and virtual environments.