Haptic Assembly of CAD Models Using Virtual Constraint Guidance
In the context of virtual reality (VR) and of computed aided design (CAD), haptic simulations are used to perform assembly tasks between 3D objects. To help the user to perform the assembly of CAD objects, we propose a new method of interactive assembly that uses both kinematic constraints and virtual guiding fixtures. Modelling a haptic assembly task as a combination of mechanical joints, we focus on the guidance of objects and on the activation cues of kinematic constraints within physical simulation. In this article, we first outline the difficulties related to the haptic-assembly of CAD objects in VR simulation. Introducing the virtual constraint guidance (VCG), we present a new method for haptic guidance that decomposes a task in two independent steps: a guiding step which use geometries as virtual fixtures to position objects, and a functional step that use kinematic constraints to perform the assembly task while deactivating locally the collisions between objects. We finally present a complete application of our method on a insertion task and present our experimental results concerning the usability of our method.