Abstract
Assembly planning is normally realized by automatic approach or interactive approach. Both of these methods have promising advantages, but they also have inevitable shortcomings. This article proposes a hybrid approach to combine automatic assembly planning and interactive assembly planning to generate optimal assembly sequence for industrial products. By defining a novel precedence constraint table to represent the assembly precedence relationships between components, the initial feasible assembly sequence can be generated by intelligent algorithm. This assembly sequence can be interactively simulated and evaluated in a haptics-based virtual environment. By simulating the multiple geometry constraints–based assembly process and assembly tool operation process, more practical precedence constraints and evaluation rules can be recognized, and more optimal assembly sequence can be re-planned. This is an iterative process until the best assembly sequence is obtained. The proposed hybrid approach can utilize the advantages of both methods, such as computer intelligence and human knowledge, and overcome their shortcomings. The generated results are more practical and flexible than traditional methods.
Highlights
Assembly planning can be classified into two types: automatic assembly planning and interactive assembly planning
The innovation of the proposed approach can be summarized as follows: (1) it provides a practical and efficient hybrid framework which can utilize the advantages of automatic assembly planning and interactive assembly planning and overcome their shortcomings; (2) it provides a novel representation of assembly precedence constraints, which can be directly integrated with the intelligent algorithm to improve the performance of automatic assembly planning; and (3) it proposes a hybrid method combining geometry constraint with physics modeling to realize haptics-based assembly simulation and haptics-based tool operation simulation
An efficient hybrid approach combining automatic assembly planning and interactive assembly planning is proposed in this article
Summary
Assembly planning can be classified into two types: automatic assembly planning and interactive assembly planning. The innovation of the proposed approach can be summarized as follows: (1) it provides a practical and efficient hybrid framework which can utilize the advantages of automatic assembly planning and interactive assembly planning and overcome their shortcomings; (2) it provides a novel representation of assembly precedence constraints, which can be directly integrated with the intelligent algorithm to improve the performance of automatic assembly planning; and (3) it proposes a hybrid method combining geometry constraint with physics modeling to realize haptics-based assembly simulation and haptics-based tool operation simulation. The designer can exert their assembly-related experience and knowledge to perform interactive assembly/disassembly operation, analyze assembly space limit and tool accessibility, evaluate human-related factors and ergonomics, and generate more practical precedence constraints and evaluation rules for the assembly knowledge base. Based on the knowledge base, the more practical and optimal assembly sequence can be planned
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