ASSEMBLY SEQUENCE VALIDATION WITH AN AUGMENTED REALITYAUTHORING TOOL

Reduction of development costs and time to market of new products has conducted to the implementation of virtual and augmented reality technologies throughout the product design and development cycle, including both manufacturing and assembly processes analysis, instead of construction of expensive and inflexible physical prototypes. Such virtual applications have demonstrated good performance in assembly process design and evaluation activities presenting information about different assembly states in real time and thanks to their flexibility manipulating and creating new working scenarios. Most of these approaches consider complex hardware and software together with processing of assembly related data, and so they are not generally suited for early stages of the product design process. There are not simple and flexible Augmented Reality (AR) authoring tools where the designer is able to create his/her own assembly scenes to quickly evaluate and create new assembly sequences with conceptual virtual models of the product. Here, the development of an AR application, called PoliART, oriented to the assembly sequence evaluation is presented, demonstrating the ability to create and evaluate assembly sequences previously obtained during the concept design stage, with a short implementation time and reduced costs. At industrial level this allows collaborative work between designers and plant engineers from the very beginning in order to consider assembly devices, times and resources.