Research On Information-Rich Technology For Virtual Assembly

Virtual Assembly (VA) is a new technology that has been widely researched home and abroad. The use of this technology shortens the product development cycle and reduces the cost of new product development. In VA, information plays an important role. Information hints in the assembly environment can guide users to complete the virtual assembly and can feed back to users' operation. To address this problem, this paper develops an Information-Rich Virtual Assembly Environment (IRVAE) based on the research of information-rich theory for VA.Firstly, this paper studies the information that requires enhancement display in the virtual assembly environment and classifies the assembly information into four categories which are part management information, part geometrical information, part topology information and assembly process information. Level Information Model is used to model the virtual assembly information. The information is managed in the information management method based on the metadata. According to the assembly information metadata structure, virtual assembly enhanced information database is built to support the whole information enhancement system.Secondly, this paper classifies the virtual assembly information into two types: text information and character information. According to the feature of text information, three enhancement methods are proposed: text model, 3D information box and word texture. For the character information, the representation of part features such as the line and plane is proposed and object-oriented technology is used to package the character information, and corresponding enhancement display methods are presented for different character types.Finally, on the Open Inventor platform, the virtual assembly information database is built with Microsoft Office Access, and the IRVAE is developed with VC++ 6.0. The accuracy and effectiveness of the system is proved with the instance of an assembly.