Design and Evaluation of a Human-Like Puppet as an Input Device for Ergonomic Simulation

摘要

Although ergonomic simulation offers great potential, it is still rarely used in production planning processes compared to other simulation tools. The main reason for this is the immense effort in time needed for creating movements and controlling the digital human model. We will present here a special input device for controlling the posture of a digital human model. Thus, we have developed a small physical puppet. The posture of the puppet can be manipulated and is mapped to the controlled digital human model. To evaluate the usability, we conducted a study in which we compared it to the mouse based user interface along the learning curve. The results show that the users postured the digital human model significantly faster with our input device than with the mouse.