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Automatic assembly simulation of product in virtual environment based on interaction feature pair

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Abstract

In engineering practical implications, assembly simulation is a useful solution to test the planned assembly process and address assembly issues. However, it is usually carried out by time-consuming human–computer interaction, which causes a lot of unavoidable laborious work. Assembly simulation could exhibit the design intent in virtual environment through the interactions between parts. Unfortunately, the models which modeled with current constraint-based method cannot provide sufficient interaction information to support assembly simulation, and the needed information should be added by designers manually. To solve this problem, this paper introduces the concept of interaction feature pair (IFP) and presents an automatic assembly simulation method based on IFP. The proposed IFP provides a form that endues a part with the capability of knowing which part is going to interact with and how to interact. Based on IFP, the automatic assembly simulation is carried out in two steps: First, a graph-based method in presented to generate the interaction sequence, which provides the information that when and which feature should be mated during assembly. Then, the randomized motion planning is employed in the established C-space to find a collision-free path for each part, and the planning results in C-space are transferred into the movements of parts in simulation environment. With these two steps, the parts could interact with other parts under a certain interaction sequence, which automatically simulates the assembly of the product. Finally, an implementation sample is presented and the results show the effectiveness of the proposed method.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the National Natural Science Foundation of China (51205316), the Natural Science Basic Research Plan in Shaanxi Province of China (2014JM7241), the Aerospace Technology Support Fund (2013-HT-XGD) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (3102014JCS05010) for financial support.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The Ministry of Education Key Lab of Contemporary Design and Integrated Manufacturing Technology, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an, 710072, China

    Jie Zhang, Pan Wang, Mi Zuo & Yuan Li

  2. School of Mechanical and Automotive Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, 510641, China

    Zhijia Xu

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  1. Jie Zhang
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  2. Pan Wang
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  3. Mi Zuo
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  4. Yuan Li
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Correspondence to Jie Zhang.

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Zhang, J., Wang, P., Zuo, M. et al. Automatic assembly simulation of product in virtual environment based on interaction feature pair. J Intell Manuf 29, 1235–1256 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10845-015-1173-y

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