Data-driven and AR assisted intelligent collaborative assembly system for large-scale complex products

Abstract

With the continuous improvement of function diversity, quality and reliability, the complexity and scale of significant products such as aerospace equipment are increasing. This trend poses severe challenges to the assembly process. The large scale of products requires the fixed-position assembly with multiple roles of workers in parallel, and it increases the difficulty of multi-person assembly. The high complexity of products makes the assembly process tedious. It is time-consuming and laborious for workers to understand the 2D documents, and it easily leads to mis-operation. The assembly process of complex products can produce huge amounts of data, which have the potential for improving efficiency and quality but remain underutilized. The high reliability of products puts forward high requirements for real-time detection of the assembly process. With the development of information technology, data driven approach and Augmented Reality (AR) provide an efficient way to change the above situation. Therefore, this paper proposes an intelligent collaboration assembly system (ICAS) combining real-time data driven method with AR technology. In the ICAS, real-time data driven method is used to realize the human-to-human and human-to-machine collaboration under the fixed-position assembly, and AR is introduced to the system to assist the assembly of large-scale complex products. The intelligent detection method in the ICAS combines 3D reconstruction with sensors measurement data, and the detection result is displayed in an intuitive way by AR. The proposed system is verified in the assembly process of a large-scale space deployable mechanism, and it paves the way for the further development of intelligent assembly in the future.