Computer-Aided Assembly Planning

Alain Delchambre

• 30 september 1992
• 9780412431708

Samenvatting:

The assembly sector is one of the least automated in the manufacturing industry. A well-chosen assembly plan will reduce both the number of tool changes and the fixtures within the assembly cell. For small batch production, the automatic generation of assembly sequences is faster, more reliable and more cost-effective than manual generation.



The methodologies developed in this book deal with the integration of the assembly process from the initial design of the product through to production. In such an integrated system assembly planning is a key asset. The book begins with a classification of existing systems of automatic generation of assembly sequences. Automatic assembly planning is a recent research area and this is the first systematic study. A well chosen assembly plan will reduce the frequency of tool changes and the number of fixtures present in the assembly cell. It will also prevent the handling of unstable sub-assemblies, simplify the design of robot grippers and reduce production costs. Significantly the system described in the second half of the book has been implemented in the ROBCAD system, which is the most commonly used off-line programming system in the car manufacturing industry. Indeed, a fully-debugged prototype of the assembly planner presented in this book is now on-stream at Zanussi, Citroen, Telemecanique, KUKA and Fiat. Accordingly designers and manufacturing engineers, together with research and development engineers should find this book of interest.