A Mobile Natural Interactive Technique With Bare Hand Manipulation and Unrestricted Force Feedback for Virtual Assembly Tasks

Most existing virtual assembly technologies cannot effectively unify the operating and feedback areas in both visualization and haptics with a large mobile workspace. Therefore, it is difficult to ensure high interactive naturalness and operational efficiency in a large assembly space. To address these problems, we propose a natural mobile interactive virtual assembly method with bare hand manipulation and unrestricted force feedback (MIVAM-BHM-UFF), covering a mobile interaction method, an unrestricted force feedback (UFF) method, and a bare hand manipulation (BHM) method. The mobile interaction method is developed to automatically track and capture the operator’s gestures in a moving way, expanding the interactive space. The UFF method is designed to provide a noncontact electromagnetic feedback force, eliminating the limitation of the traditional force feedback device and improving the interactive naturalness. A BHM method is proposed to improve interactive efficiency by unifying the operational area and feedback area. To verify the effectiveness of MIVAM-BHM-UFF, five assembly experiments were carried out. Experimental results indicate that compared with four assembly techniques, MIVAM-BHM-UFF shows better user experiences in the virtual assembly processes.