Evaluation of 3D printing approach for manual assembly training

Assembly is an important aspect of the manufacturing process. Proper assembly training plays a vital role for efficient operations. Therefore, this paper suggests a new assembly training approach based on 3D printing technology. The proposed approach is compared to existing assembly training methods including conventional drawing (CD) and virtual reality (VR). Different size scales of product are considered to evaluate and validate the suggested 3D printing approach. The training performance is evaluated based on completion time of assembly task, number of assembly errors, number of frustration points during the task, and completion percentage. The experiments have been conducted on 25 participants using the three assembly training approaches. The obtained results show that the 3D model performed better than the other two conventional methods. The results also illustrate that there is no significant effect from the 3D model scale variation on the assembly training performance.