Interpretation of assembly procedure in instruction manual using simulation in virtual space

Understanding mechanical instruction manual is one of the difficult tasks for computer. In many cases, we cannot understand mechanical instruction manual without other knowledge on environment, instruction, picture, and figure. In this paper, we propose the automatic assembling system of a virtual machine based on the understanding of mechanical assembly manual. Mechanical assembly manual generally consists of two parts, text and illustration. So we can get the correct way of assembling as the result of simulating assembly operations by manipulating virtual parts referring to the texts and illustration.