Verification of the Effect of an Assembly Skill Transfer Method on Cognition Skills

This paper aims to investigate an effective assembly skill transfer method to improve the novice operator's assembly performance. Training novice operators with all of the skilled operators' assembly skills in a short time has so far proven unsuccessful. Therefore, to accelerate the training period, we attempted to extract and transfer the assembly skills on which the skilled operators and the novice operators place different emphases. Since the assembly tasks in the cellular manufacturing system primarily comprise cognitive tasks, the assembly performance depends on the operators' cognition skills. We applied the developed skill transfer method via a “peg-insertion task” to verify its effect on cognition skills. The results indicate that the proposed assembly skill transfer system can considerably improve novice operators' assembly performance.