Capturing assembly constraints of experimental setups in a virtual laboratory environment

Recently, multi-player game engines have been explored regarding their potential for implementing virtual laboratory environments for engineering and science education. In these developments, the virtual assembly process of the laboratory equipment is a critical step, and a detailed formalized description of how different components of the experimental equipment are to be joined in the assembly process is necessary. This description includes the joint types (lower and upper kinematic pairs) and the associated degrees of freedom, the resulting mobility of the assembly as well as the joint fit requirements. In this paper, a formalized representation of the assembly process that captures the information on the joint kinematics and the components' degrees of freedom generated when assembling laboratory equipment in a virtual laboratory environment will be discussed. A planetary gear train system will be used as an example to illustrate the proposed method. In particular, the structure of the assembly of a planetary gear train system involves assembly constraints between a group of components (sun, planet and ring gears, shafts, planet carrier assembly, etc.) that generate the desired relationship between the input and output motions. This paper will identify important requirements for modeling different configurations of planetary gear train assemblies within a game-based virtual laboratory environment. These requirements include the positioning and the orienting of the components, the verification of the kinematic joints, the propagation of the mating constraints and the capturing of the joint attributes.