Measuring the difficulty of assembly tasks from tool access information

Focusing on accessibility issues, this paper presents a qualitative measure of assembly task di culty based on concepts from information theory. It is proposed that assembly task di culty is directly proportional to the logarithm of the assembly task e ciency, this efciency being a function of the average information content of the assembly task. Preliminary evaluation results are presented where the performance of this metric is tested. The results suggest that the new measure does a good job in capturing assembly di culty as a function of assembly geometry. In Proceedings IEEE International Symposium on Assembly and Task Planning, August 10-11, 1995, Pittsburgh, PA.