Abstract
In this paper, the use of head mounted display immersive virtual reality (VR)
is investigated as both a cable harness design routing and an assembly planning tool. Due to
the nature of this technology being more intuitive as an interface for generating design and
process planning information, it is important to understand in detail the activities being
carried out by the designer whilst immersed in the 3D virtual environment since health and
safety recommendations dictate a maximum of around 20 minutes exposure for the user.
After covering earlier work comparing CAD/VR productivity studies, follow-on work is
outlined describing an immersive VR-based design platform developed for the design,
assembly planning and installation planning of cable harnesses. This is presented in the form
of recent, extensive system evaluations which analysed a number of participants carrying out
cable routing design tasks. User activities were broken down using a novel design task
categorisation scheme which enabled a detailed understanding of the design activity being
carried out. This successfully illustrated where the designers were spending their valuable
time being creative, generating design information, navigating through the model, correcting
errors, accessing help information, etc. and, for the first time, allowed the system to be
statistically evaluated in terms of performance and category relationships. The categorisation
scheme provides a valuable formal tool for understanding design behaviour and could be used
not only with immersive VR design systems but for comparing different design platforms
such as CAD systems. As well as this, non-intrusive logging also enable assembly planner
activities to be monitored and recorded; the subsequent analysis of this data enabled
chronological cable harness assembly and cable harness installation plans to be automatically
produced along with the incorporation of real-world estimates of assembly times.
Keywords - Cable harness, design, assembly planning, virtual reality, virtual engineering.