Telepresence as a solution to manual micro-assembly

The progressive miniaturization and customization of today's products has lead to increased demand for manual micro-assembly systems. Telepresence technologies provide a promising solution to manual micro-assembly through overcoming scaling barriers and achieving high accuracies, while offering flexibility and an intuitive human-controlled working environment. Guaranteeing such an intuitive environment involves the provision of adequate feedback information. Various physical sensor arrangements at the micro-assembly site are used to generate haptic feedback in the human-controlled environment. Non-physical or "virtual" sensors, although artificially generated, can also remarkably improve user intuition. For precise controlling and high fidelity feedback, telepresence environments also require a flexible communication platform between the human operator and the assembly site.