Virtual reality based digital chain for creating a knowledge base of hand gestures in maintenance tasks

Hand gestures are key aspects in maintenance work. In this paper, we present a methodology for creating a digital knowledge base of maintenance hand gestures by applying virtual reality technology. Our motivation is rooted in the need to create work instructions that shall illustrate details of hand gestures that are the appropriate for particular maintenance operations. In this research, we propose an approach of recording, classifying and clustering such hand gestures in a library of gesture. Within this library, we can characterize each gesture and relate them to mechanical assembly and disassembly operations with respect to their appropriateness. Through this relationship, we create a knowledge base that can be used for suggesting hand gestures, as well as for rating them in e.g. training tasks. Furthermore, key elements of work instructions for operators can be derived from it. As a demonstration, we showed the process chain applied to the process of registration of hand gesture in simply maintenance task.