Human-machine Collaboration in Virtual Reality for Adaptive Production Engineering

This paper outlines the main steps towards an open and adaptive simulation method for human-robot collaboration (HRC) in production engineering supported by virtual reality (VR). The work is based on the latest software developments in the gaming industry, in addition to the already commercially available hardware that is robust and reliable. This allows to overcome VR limitations of the industrial software provided by manufacturing machine producers and it is based on an open-source community programming approach and also leads to significant advantages such as interfacing with the latest developed hardware for realistic user experience in immersive VR, as well as the possibility to share adaptive algorithms. A practical implementation in Unity is provided as a functional prototype for feasibility tests. However, at the time of this paper, no controlled human-subject studies on the implementation have been noted, in fact, this is solely provided to show preliminary proof of concept. Future work will formally address the questions that are raised in this first run.