skip to main content
OSTI.GOV title logo U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Scientific and Technical Information

Title: Geometric reasoning about assembly tools

Abstract

Planning for assembly requires reasoning about various tools used by humans, robots, or other automation to manipulate, attach, and test parts and subassemblies. This paper presents a general framework to represent and reason about geometric accessibility issues for a wide variety of such assembly tools. Central to the framework is a use volume encoding a minimum space that must be free in an assembly state to apply a given tool, and placement constraints on where that volume must be placed relative to the parts on which the tool acts. Determining whether a tool can be applied in a given assembly state is then reduced to an instance of the FINDPLACE problem. In addition, the author presents more efficient methods to integrate the framework into assembly planning. For tools that are applied either before or after their target parts are mated, one method pre-processes a single tool application for all possible states of assembly of a product in polynomial time, reducing all later state-tool queries to evaluations of a simple expression. For tools applied after their target parts are mated, a complementary method guarantees polynomial-time assembly planning. The author presents a wide variety of tools that can be described adequately usingmore » the approach, and surveys tool catalogs to determine coverage of standard tools. Finally, the author describes an implementation of the approach in an assembly planning system and experiments with a library of over one hundred manual and robotic tools and several complex assemblies.« less

Authors:
Publication Date:
Research Org.:
Sandia National Lab. (SNL-NM), Albuquerque, NM (United States)
Sponsoring Org.:
USDOE, Washington, DC (United States)
OSTI Identifier:
434422
Report Number(s):
SAND-95-2423
ON: DE97002709; TRN: 97:001114
DOE Contract Number:  
AC04-94AL85000
Resource Type:
Technical Report
Resource Relation:
Other Information: PBD: Jan 1997
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English
Subject:
32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATION; ROBOTS; AUTOMATION; TOOLS; PLANNING; USES; GEOMETRY

Citation Formats

Wilson, R H. Geometric reasoning about assembly tools. United States: N. p., 1997. Web. doi:10.2172/434422.
Wilson, R H. Geometric reasoning about assembly tools. United States. https://doi.org/10.2172/434422
Wilson, R H. 1997. "Geometric reasoning about assembly tools". United States. https://doi.org/10.2172/434422. https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/434422.
@article{osti_434422,
title = {Geometric reasoning about assembly tools},
author = {Wilson, R H},
abstractNote = {Planning for assembly requires reasoning about various tools used by humans, robots, or other automation to manipulate, attach, and test parts and subassemblies. This paper presents a general framework to represent and reason about geometric accessibility issues for a wide variety of such assembly tools. Central to the framework is a use volume encoding a minimum space that must be free in an assembly state to apply a given tool, and placement constraints on where that volume must be placed relative to the parts on which the tool acts. Determining whether a tool can be applied in a given assembly state is then reduced to an instance of the FINDPLACE problem. In addition, the author presents more efficient methods to integrate the framework into assembly planning. For tools that are applied either before or after their target parts are mated, one method pre-processes a single tool application for all possible states of assembly of a product in polynomial time, reducing all later state-tool queries to evaluations of a simple expression. For tools applied after their target parts are mated, a complementary method guarantees polynomial-time assembly planning. The author presents a wide variety of tools that can be described adequately using the approach, and surveys tool catalogs to determine coverage of standard tools. Finally, the author describes an implementation of the approach in an assembly planning system and experiments with a library of over one hundred manual and robotic tools and several complex assemblies.},
doi = {10.2172/434422},
url = {https://www.osti.gov/biblio/434422}, journal = {},
number = ,
volume = ,
place = {United States},
year = {Wed Jan 01 00:00:00 EST 1997},
month = {Wed Jan 01 00:00:00 EST 1997}
}