Dassault is increasingly using tactile virtual reality (VR) to design its Falcon business jets. Haptic (from the Greek for sense of touch) interfaces, such as force-feedback arms, allow engineers to better check maintainability early in the design phase. Along with several partners, the French manufacturer (Booth No. 7514) is integrating these tools into its Catia v5 product lifecycle management (PLM) suite of software programs.
“Haptic interfaces make virtual removal of a part easy,” Alexis Deneux, a Dassault design engineer specializing in methods and tools, told EBACE Convention News. For example, a human operator can use a force-feedback arm in a virtual environment. This type of arm has six degrees of freedom–three in rotation and three in translation (that is, uniform movement along a straight line). The operator sees the aircraft, or part of it, in three dimensions and seizes the part he has to remove. Every time the object collides with its housing, the operator feels it through the force-feedback arm. This allows him to determine whether he can find a reasonable way to extract the component.
