A staged haptic rendering approach for virtual assembly of bolted joints in mechanical assembly

Haptic rendering in virtual environment provides a powerful training and validation tool for assembly of bolted joints that require accurate assembly forces. This work proposes a staged haptic rendering approach for virtual assembly (VA) of bolted joints. Firstly, by analyzing the stress condition during the actual assembly process, four consecutive stages, namely navigation stage, transition stage, linearity stage, and yield stage, are identified. Then, the force rendering model is set up. Moreover, a prototype VA system is developed to implement and test the approach. Two groups of experiments on a two-stage gear reducer are conducted to verify the feasibility of the approach and evaluate the prototype’s performance. The results have shown that the force calculated by the proposed approach is consistent with the actual assembly and the evaluators are highly positive on the immersion and the guiding ability of the VA process with the haptic rendering provided.