The affect of contact force sensations on user performance in virtual assembly tasks

International audienceAbstract The development of a realistic virtual assemblyenvironment is challenging because of the complexity of the physical processes and the limitation of available VRtechnology. Many research activities in this domain pri-marily focused on particular aspects of the assembly task such as the feasibility of assembly operations in terms of interference between the manipulated parts. The virtualassembly environment reported in this research is focusedon mechanical part assembly. The approach presented ad-dresses the problem of part-to-part contacts during themating phase of assembly tasks. The system describedcalculates contact force sensations by making their inten-sity dependent on the depth of penetration. However thepenetration is not visible to the user who sees a separatemodel, which does not intersect the mating part model. Thetwo 3D models of the part, the off-screen rendered modeland the on-screen rendered model are connected by aspring-dumper arrangement. The force calculated is felt bythe operator through the haptic interface when parts comein contact during the mating phase of the assembly task. Anevaluation study investigating the effect of contact forcesensation on user performance during part-to-part interfacewas conducted. The results showed statistically significanteffect of contact force sensation on user performance interms of task completion time. The subjective evaluationbased on feedback from users confirmed that contact forcesensation is a useful cue for the operator to find the relativepositions of components in the final assembly state