Development of a virtual maintenance system with virtual hand

Aiming to improve the flexibility of virtual maintenance operations, virtual hand was designed and applied in a virtual maintenance system. The structure of virtual hand was designed according to the real human hand and the frequently used gestures of virtual hand were elaborated. Moreover, the motion mapping from human hand to virtual hand was established and a framework which described the interaction mechanism of virtual maintenance system with virtual hand was proposed. Finally, a prototype system was developed and an example of scraper conveyor was provided. The application results indicated that virtual hand can simulate most of operations through real human hand and the flexibility of virtual maintenance operations was improved.