Feature-based assembly mating reasoning

This paper presents a feature-based method to obtain assembly mating relati ons between a set of polyhedral components. Previous research in assembly p lanning has assumed that these assembly mating relations, or equivalent inf ormation such as the final assembled configuration of the components, is pr ovided as part of the problem input. This paper addresses the case where on ly the component geometry is provided, which can arise in product maintenan ce or emergency repair applications where the originally designed assembly mating relations are no longer valid, and in robotic autonomous constructio n applications. The basis of the method is to represent components in terms of form features using a feature recognition method based on Alternating S um of Volumes with Partitioning (ASVP) decomposition. Feature recognition i s applied to each component to obtain its Form Feature Decomposition (FFD), which is a hierarchy of positive and/or negative form features. Positive f orm features of each component are compared with negative form features of other components to obtain mating relations between pairs of features. Mult iple feature matings between the same pair of components are merged into co mponent matings, which comprise the assembly mating relations. A backtracki ng search generates all feasible assembly configurations from the component matings.