A Fingertips-Based Approach To Select Maintenance Tool Automatically In Virtual Environment

Virtual maintenance plays an important role in improving product maintainability at the early stage of design and its simulation provides an economic and efficient method for product design and analysis. However, while carrying on simulations, it is cumbersome for operators to adjust the hand joints one-by-one to match the virtual tools to the virtual hand. Furthermore, it's repetitive to complete the action frames with the aid of kinematic tools. This paper presents a methodology for the automatic selection of virtual maintenance tools. It's based on the mapping relationship between hand gesture and maintenance tool. Inverse kinematics theory verifies that hand gesture can be determined by its poses of five fingertips. So, by making certain hand gesture, its corresponding tool can be selected and set to virtual hand in a well-defined pose, which reduces the time consuming for maintenance tool selection and hand gesture adjustment. A test case is presented to demonstrate the application of the suggested methodology on a real simulation.