Abstract
Composite laminate manual lay-up operations and component quality inspections involve a variety of complex operations and instructions requiring highly-skilled operators, which can result in time-consuming and cost-inefficient processes. This research attempts to check the compatibility of Virtual Fabric Placement (VFP) and Microsoft Kinect to aid laminators and composite production. This research has investigated the feasibility of using this tracking technology to support the virtual prototyping of manual composite lay-up. It is concluded that, at the current stage of development, Kinect and VFP can be successfully used for virtual prototyping of large scale geometries while encountering only negligible tracking error with respect to mould size.