Micro Planning for Mechanical Assembly Operations

Abstract

Significant advances have been made in the area of macro planning for assembly operations (i.e., dividing a product into sub-assemblies, determining the sequence of assembly operations). On the contrary, the state of the art in micro planning (i.e., tool selection, path planning for tool and part movements) is rather primitive. To generate a realizable assembly plan, both macro planning and micro planning problems need to be solved. Tooling considerations are an important component of the micro planning problem. Therefore, we present a methodology for modeling assembly tools, selecting tools for assembly operations, and generating detailed tool movements. Techniques described in this paper can be combined with macro planning techniques to result in a complete assembly planner.