Abstract: Existing approaches to
automatic assembly planning often lead to combinatorial
explosion. When the parts composing the assembly increase in
number, computer-aided planning becomes much slower than manual
planning. Efforts to reduce the computing time by taking into
account various constraints and criteria to guide the search for
the optimal plan requires too much input information, so as to
offset the convenience of automatic assembly planning. In
addition, as the planner becomes more complicated, such efforts
often fail to reach the objective. This paper presents a new
concept-"unit", asserting that the internal structure of an
assembly is hierachical. Every disassembly operation only
handles several units, no matter how many parts are involved.
Furthermore, the scenario of disassembly is brought to light. It
relates to only two key data-the liaison type and the assembly
direction. The computational cast of this approach is roughly
proportional to the number of parts. A planner, implementing
these principles can generate the optimal assembly plans
dramatically faster than the known approaches.
Key words:
Assembly planning Task planning Assembly sequence CIMS CAM
CAPP
* This project is supported by Chinese State Commission for Science and
Technology and the European Community as a part of the EC-China joint
project "High-Level Programming Languages for Robotized
Assembly". Manuscript received on November 20, 1993; revised manuscript
July 8, 1994
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