Design of an automated assembly environment (original) (raw)

Automatic assembling procedure generation from mating conditions

Computer-Aided Design, 1987

A method is developed to automatically generate an assembling procedure for an assembly. In this work, an assembly is described by its components and their relationship in an assembly, especially the mating conditions. From the mating conditions of the components, an assembling procedure is generated in two steps. First, each component in an assembly is located at a specific vertex of a hierarchical tree. Second, an assembling procedure is generated from the hierarchical tree with the help of interference checking.

Tiny programming language to improve assembly generation for automation equipment

International journal of computers, 2011

The development time in industrial informatics systems, within industry environments, is a very important issue for competitiveness. The usage of adequate targetspecific programming languages is very important because they can facilitate and improve developers' productivity, allowing solutions to be expressed in the idiom and at the level of abstraction of the problem's domain. In this paper we present a target-specific programming language, which was designed to improve the design cycle of code generation, for an industrial embedded system. The native assembly code, the new language structure and their constructs, are presented in the paper. The proposed targetspecific language is expressed using words and terms that are related to the target's domain and consequently it is now easier to program, understand and to validate the desired code. It is also demonstrated the language efficiency by comparing some code described using the new language against the previous used code. The design cycle is improved with the usage of the target-specific language because both description and debug time are significantly reduced with this new software tool. This is also a case of university-industry partnership.

A Model for Capturing Product Assembly Information

Journal of Computing and Information Science in Engineering, 2006

The important issue of mechanical assemblies has been a subject of intense research over the past several years. Most electromechanical products are assemblies of several components, for various technical as well as economic reasons. This paper provides an object-oriented definition of an assembly model called the Open Assembly Model (OAM) and defines an extension to the NIST Core Product Model (NIST-CPM). The assembly model represents the function, form, and behavior of the assembly and defines both a system level conceptual model and associated hierarchical relationships. The model provides a way for tolerance representation and propagation, kinematics representation, and engineering analysis at the system level. The assembly model is open so as to enable plug-and-play with various applications, such as analysis (FEM, tolerance, assembly), process planning, and virtual assembly (using VR techniques). With the advent of the Internet more and more products are designed and manufactured globally in a distributed and collaborative environment. The class structure defined in OAM can be used by designers to collaborate in such an environment.

A virtual object manipulation interface for automated assembly programming

Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics

This work describes the implementation of a novel robotic workcell programming interface that allows an assembly designer to obtain immediate feedback regarding the manufacturability of his design. The interface allows the user to manipnlate the threedimensional CAD/CAM models of the components and "assemble" them into the final product. The computer then analyzes the relevant assembly operations and translates them into low-level commands for the robots in the specific workcell under consideration. This work is motivated by the complexity and time-consuming nature of manually programming flexible assembly cells for the manufacture of different products, particularly when they involve the cooperation of multiple robot manipulators.

Design of a Feature-object-based Mechanical Assembly Library

Computer-Aided Design and Applications

In this paper, a new feature-based assembly library for injection mould bases is presented. Assembly design feature-object modeling and configuration management are the key technologies developed. This library is an important functional module of QuickMould, which is a productivity software tool for plastic injection mould design. Interactions between the library and mould design processes are realized. This paper also covers the details about the design of the system and the realization of some major functions, with which, the process of traditional mould design is simplified and standardized. Consequently, the lead-time for plastic injection mould can be significantly shortened.

Object-Oriented Modeling of Complex Mechatronic Components for the Manufacturing Industry

IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics, 2000

The advantages of object-oriented modeling, as modularity and reusability of components, are very important also for modeling manufacturing systems and not only for software development. Recently, a unified object-oriented approach for modeling both the logical and the physical part of a manufacturing machine has been proposed. In this paper we show the effectiveness of this new modeling framework on an industrial application. The case study consists of the package forming unit of a filling machine for liquid food packaging, developed by Tetra Pak Carton Ambient S.p.a.

Research Issues for Automatic Assembly

IFAC Proceedings Volumes, 1977

The research issues currently being explored world wide will be discussed. The work falls under two main headings namely, a) parts mating phenomenaquantitative descriptions of what happens when parts interact during the assembly process, the kind of information available, its quality etc. b) programmability-the capability of a machine to be taught a new task rather than being built specifically to do the task. Exploration of the parts mating question requires investigation into geometric, force-friction, and logical test characteristics of the mating process, involving the generation of and the carrying out of very precise experiments to examine hypothesis. Programmability issues include the analysis of manufactured products to determine kinds of tasks, statistics of their occurence and geometric requirements on the placing and alignment of parts; and the general economic modeling and comparison of manual assembly, assembly by special machines and assembly by programmable machines.

An object-oriented modelling framework for automated manufacturing system

Proposed in the paper is an object-oriented modelling (OOM) framework, called a JR-net modelling framework, for automated manufacturing system (AMS) design. The proposed modelling framework, which consists of a graphical modelling tool called JR-net (job resource relation-net) and a modelling building procedure, is the same as the current practice of AMS design and is based on the OOM paradigm. In other words, a virtual prototype of AMS is constructed step-by-step based on a three-phase modelling approach: static layout modelling (object model); job¯ow modelling (functional JR-net model); supervisory control modelling (dynamic model). A functional JR-net model is a directed graph in which the standard resources of an AMS become nodes and job transfers among the resources become the arcs of the graph. A complete (dynamic) JR-net model is obtained by specifying supervisory control requirements using tokens in the functional JR-net model. The usefulness of the proposed OOM framework is demonstrated by applying it to the modelling of an AS/ RS. Also addressed are implementation issues of JR-net models.