IMA-VR: A multimodal virtual training system for skills transfer in Industrial Maintenance and Assembly tasks

Industrial Maintenance and Assembly is a very complex task involving both cognitive skills (procedural skills) and motor skills (fine motor control and bi-manual coordination skills). This paper presents a controlled multimodal training system, for transferring the motor and cognitive skills involved in these tasks. The new platform provides different multimodal aids and learning strategies that help and guide the users during their training process. One of the main features of this system is its flexibility to adapt itself to the task demands and to the users´ preferences and needs supporting different configurations. To address bi-manual operations the platform offers different alternatives, one of them is a set-up composed of a haptic device to track the motion of the operator´s dominant hand and simulate the physical interaction within the virtual environment, together with a marker-less motion capture system to track the motion of the other hand in real time.