Original Date: 01/23/1995
Revision Date: 01/18/2007

Because modern products have more parts, are designed faster by different designers, and are packed into a smaller volume, Sandia performs automatic assembly planning to aid in manufacturing. The design is checked using this application to ensure that products can be easily assembled, serviced, and disassembled. This confirms design assembly ease, checks designers' assembly plans to avoid costly mistakes, reduces time to market by automating parts of the production planning process, and gives feedback to designers regarding the assembly and disassembly process.

Automatic assembly planning has many advantages over traditional methods of analyzing assembly processes. The process can be verified and code generated for robotic programming before the product leaves the design stage. This can be used with solids modeling in design for assembly analysis tools, as well as for disassembly analysis to aid in the recycling of future products.

This work is part of the Archimedes Project in the Intelligent Systems and Robotic Center and provides the A-PRIMED project with assembly manufacturing feedback and automated robot workcell programming. The project takes solid computer models of parts and determines if the parts can be fit together. It also checks if parts can be easily inserted or removed from the final assembly for maintenance, repair, or assembly. In addition, this project checks to ensure there is room for the necessary tools and working tool space. The project maintains a goal to build and demonstrate an assembly planning system that could assemble products in robotic workcells and provide designers with useful feedback on the assembly process.

The project encompass use of automatic tool selection for the robotic workcell including screwdrivers, wrenches, laser welders, grippers, and cameras. Other work includes improved reasoning in assembly algorithms and reasoning about flexible parts.

The integration of projects such as automatic assembly planning helps Sandia to improve their manufacturing capabilities and achieve agility in manufacturing.

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