Thesis (M.Eng.) - Asian Institute of Technology, 1997

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Engineering, School of Advanced Technologies

This work provides a software system, which can automatically determine the assembly sequence of a product from its parts, given only a geometric description of the assembly. For many products, the available software systems exist an exponentially large set of sequences, and a natural goal is to use automated systems to select wisely from the choices. Since assembly sequencing is a preprocessing phase for a long and expensive manufacturing process, any work towards finding a "better" assembly sequence is of great value when it comes to the time to assemble the physical product in mass quantities. A step is taken in this direction by introducing a simple closed envelope method for product geometry representation, and an efficient matrix method to represent contact and interference relations among the parts. The possible sub-assemblies are automatically detected by satisfying some mathematical conditions applicable to these matrices. Possible assembly sequences are generated for each sub-assembly and for the whole product. Furthermore, the algorithms are successfully examined with several industrial products of 2 to 50 parts and 8 to 1000 faces, limited to one-handed one-directional translational motions. Experimental results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach. Future work is directed towards using these methods to develop a generalized assembly sequence planning software system with user interface.