Due to the increasing individualization of products through their adaptability to customer wishes, unit numbers of product series are becoming smaller while the development work involved remains the same. In this context, shorter development times would help to accommodate this trend more easily. One way to achieve time savings is by transitioning from real to hybrid prototypes for quality inspections, thus decreasing the production time required for real prototypes.

The aim of our RobVRAR lab is to develop functional virtual prototypes for robot-based quality inspection by coupling the procedure for the haptic inspection of an object with smart hybrid prototyping (SHP). This innovative approach offers the potential to conduct robot-based quality inspection early on in the form of purely virtual but also hybrid prototype tests. This allows both objective and subjective quality criteria to be collected in the context of user studies at an early stage of the product development process (PDP). The aim of this is to ensure that products are better adapted to the needs of users by including subjective evaluation criteria at an earlier stage. Furthermore, time and cost savings can be achieved in manufacturing by avoiding late changes in the PEP.

The lab is equipped with a 6-axle robot arm (Mitsubishi RV-7FRLL), hardware for reading out and controlling the robot as well as a Vive Pro 1 to visualize VR environments.