Procrustes Analysis for the Virtual Trial Assembly of large-size elements E. Maset a,* , L. Scalera a , D. Zonta b , I. M. Alba b , F. Crosilla a , A. Fusiello a a Polytechnic Department of Engineering and Architecture, University of Udine, Italy b Cimolai S.p.A., Pordenone, Italy Abstract Virtual assembly is an essential method to increase efficiency and to identify potential issues of the assembly process in several manufacturing fields, as for instance robotized assembly. The paper presents a novel procedure based on Affine Procrustes Analysis for the Virtual Trial Assembly (VTA) of large-size elements. This approach to virtual assembly allows to identify possible dis- crepancies between the workpieces and their nominal specifications, and to au- tomatically define shape and dimensions of the potential corrective elements needed to achieve the designed assembly. The method is a variation of the clas- sical Extended Orthogonal Procrustes Analysis (a tool that provides the least squares alignment among corresponding points), and permits to easily verify the parallelism condition of planes of large-size elements and the satisfaction of the alignment tolerances in the components to be assembled. Furthermore, the method implicitly takes into account the presence of corrective elements, avoiding assembly errors propagation. Experiments show the feasibility of the proposed approach and its advantages with respect to the classical one. The novel method is applied to the challenging assembly of dogbones elements of Vessel in New York. Keywords: Virtual Trial Assembly, Affine Orthogonal Procrustes Analysis, assembly analysis, computer-aided manufacturing, Vessel - New York * Corresponding author Email address: maset.eleonora@spes.uniud.it (E. Maset) Preprint submitted to Robotics and Computer-Integrated Manufacturing November 11, 2019