Cable harness design, assembly and installation planning using immersive virtual reality |
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Authors: | James M Ritchie Graham Robinson Philip N Day Richard G Dewar Raymond C W Sung John E L Simmons |
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Affiliation: | (1) Scottish Manufacturing Institute, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, EH14 4AS, UK |
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Abstract: | Earlier research work using immersive virtual reality (VR) in the domain of cable harness design has shown conclusively that
this technology had provided substantial productivity gains over traditional computer-aided design (CAD) systems. The follow-on
work in this paper was aimed at understanding the degree to which various aspects of the immersive VR system were contributing
to these benefits and how engineering design and planning processes could be analysed in detail as they are being carried
out; the nature of this technology being such that the user’s activities can be non-intrusively monitored and logged without
interrupting a creative design process or a manufacturing planning task. This current research involved the creation of a
more robust CAD-equivalent VR system for cable harness routing design, harness assembly and installation planning which could
be functionally evaluated using a set of creative design-task experiments to provide detail about the system and users’ performance.
A design task categorisation scheme was developed which allowed both a general and detailed breakdown of the design engineer’s
cable harness design process and associated activities. This showed that substantial amounts of time were spend by the designer
in navigation (41%), sequence breaks (28%) and carrying out design-related activities (27%). The subsequent statistical analysis
of the data also allowed cause and effect relationships between categories to be examined and showed statistically significant
results in harness design, harness design modification and menu/model interaction. This insight demonstrated that poorly designed
interfaces can have adverse affects on the productivity of the designer and that 3D direct manipulation interfaces have advantages.
Indeed, the categorisation scheme provided a valuable tool for understanding design behaviour and could be used for comparing
different design platforms as well as examining other aspects of the design function, such as the acquisition of design decision
intent. The system also demonstrated the successful automatic generation of cable harness assembly and cable harness installation
plans from non-intrusive user-system interaction logging, which further demonstrates the potential for concurrent design and
manufacturing planning to be carried out. |
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