A novel Geometric feasibility method to perform assembly sequence planning through oblique orientations

Abstract

Robots are widely used in manufacturing industries to perform various assembly operations given by a planner and such planner should be capable of performing necessary predicate testing to generate a feasible solution. Geometric feasibility (GF) is a pre-requisite and most essential assembly predicate that identify collision free paths to perform robotic assembly actions. However, the automated GF testing is limited to principal axes whereas it require human intervention to test in other possible directions. In this research, a novel automated method to generate Oblique-directional interference matrix (ODIM) is proposed to solve the problem. The developed method is tested over the real-time products and confirmed the applicability to identify the collision free paths. It is integrated with an existed assembly planner to test associativity for other predicates and observed the effectiveness by comparing with different methods. The results are indicating that the developed method is generating an optimal solution at minimum computational effort.