In recent years, a significant growth of mini and micro products’ market shares has been detected. However, the assembly systems and assembly processes of larger products cannot be transferred to mini or micro products in an acceptable way, which results of the special physical properties of small components. Apart from new materials, special problems with handling and tolerances of these produ...

Assembly lines are special flow-line production systems which are of great importance in the industrial production of high quantity standardized commodities. Recently, assembly lines even gained importance in low volume production of customized products (mass-customization). Due to high capital requirements when installing or redesigning a line, its configuration planning is of great relevance ...

Presented in this paper is an interactive approach of assembly planning. It provides a virtual reality interface for production engineers to program the virtual representation of robotic manipulators in a three-dimensional operation space. The direct human involvement creates a user-defined assembly sequence, which contains the human knowledge of mechanical assembly. By extracting the precedenc...

In sequenced automobile assembly, the assignment of personnel is done at almost all major manufacturers subordinate to the sequencing, resulting in sub-optimal utilization of personnel resources. By integrating the sequence planning with the personnel assignment planning, a significant increase in hours-per-vehicle efficiencies is possible. The presented integrated planning approach combines a ...

Abstract: The assembly of complex microsystems consisting of several single components (i.e. hybrid microsystems) is a task which has to be solved to make mass production of microsystems possible. Therefore, it is necessary to introduce flexible, highly precise and fast microassembly methods. In this paper, the control system of a microrobot-based microassembly desktop station that has been dev...

In this paper, a 4-PPPS redundantly actuated parallel mechanism and its motion planning method are proposed. The mechanism can be applied to the positioning and alignment of large subassembly in engineering assembly. The optimization of the positioning and alignment trajectory is performed with the minimum energy consumption as the objective function. The system test data shows that the assembl...

This paper presents a provably correct and efficient, polynomial time, planning tool and its application to a miniature assembly line for toy cars. Although somewhat limited, this process has many similarities with real industrial processes. One of our previous polynomial-time planning algorithms has been extended and adapted to work for a larger class of planning problems, including this parti...

In this paper we shall discuss how to treat the automatic generation of assembly task specifications as a constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) over finite and infinite domains. Conceptually it is straightforward to formulate assembly planning in terms of CSP, however the choice of constraint representation and of the order in which the constraints are applied is nontrivial if a computationally...

The purpose of this research is to objectively evaluate the differences among the feasible assembly sequences. For this purpose, a computer-aided Assembly Sequence Planning and Evaluation system (ASPEN) was developed. ASPEN automatically searches all geometrically feasible sequences by decomposing solid models of a product. ASPEN also chooses an optimum sequence with the least operating time. M...