Development and Evaluation of a Virtual Simulation Environment for a Visuo-Haptic User Console

Novel devices such as medical devices, watches, electronic devices are getting smaller with advanced technologies. As a result, these devices have small components. To assemble these components, manual and purely automated assembly has been used. Another approach is teleoperated microassembly station to assemble these components. In BIROMED-Lab, a teleoperated micro-assembly system is under development. It would help to assemble mechatronic prototype devices. Haptic devices are used for operating the micro-assembly station due to their force rendering capability. Force rendering capability can increase the intuitiveness of the user. We have the user side of the system ready, but the assembly side is not. That’s why we would like to have a virtual assembly side to test or improve it. We implemented a teleoperated assembly in the virtual world. A haptic device controlled a robotic arm. An evaluation study was done at the end of the thesis to answer the research question. We had three tasks safe robot condition speed parameters, real robot condition speed parameters, and infinite speed parameters. We had 10 participants, but we used only 6 participants’ data. This thesis tried to answer how joint speed can affect the task time, accuracy, and intuitiveness of users. A 3-DOF robotic arm simulated in a 3D simulation software. To accomplish that, inverse kinematics were calculated for this 3-DOF robotic arm, and an option to set individual joint speed limits for each joint was implemented. A communication between simulation and haptic device was created. We had a robotic arm, a peg, and a hole in the simulation. The task was to pick the peg and place it in the hole. To create this virtual scene, its solutions were compared with the analytical approach, and the decision was given. We were investigating with this research to see joint speeds at all. Physical limits are what robots naturally can do. Safe limits are often done in applications, and infinite limits can’t be realized in the real world. During the design of the scene, an engineering approach was used. After defining the requirements based on the target application, we used morphological analysis to generate sub-solutions. Then, we selected the appropriate solution by use-value analysis. In conclusion, the speed parameter affects the task time, accuracy, and intuitiveness. The fastest robot condition has the lowest task time, and the safe robot has more accuracy on average. With these results, the teleoperated micro-assembly station could be improved further. Furthermore, the results showed that different speed parameters affect task time, accuracy, and intuitiveness.