Motion planning for assembly mating operations

Abstract

The authors introduce a planning system that relies on a novel approach which converts geometrical descriptions of assembly parts into potential field representations and then translates assembly operations into equivalent operations on the potential field representations. As a consequence, the system is able to quickly compute a path for the assembly motions and isolate those regions of the path where force/torque guided motions must be introduced to cope with possible collisions that may be caused by the prevailing uncertainties in the positions/orientations of the parts and their dimensions. This system has been experimentally verified using a Cincinnati Milacron T/sup 3-/726 robot to assemble a gear box.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>