Publications Details

Automatic assembly planning and its role in agile manufacturing: A Sandia perspective

Jones, R.E.; Kaufman, S.G.

Sandia has been studying automatic assembly planning of electromechanical devices for some years, based on an implemented system called Archimedes. Work done to date has focussed on automatic generation of high-level plans, and translation of these plans into robotic control code and workcell layout. More recently, the importance of an assembly planning capability as a design aid has been emphasized, as it could potentially provide early feedback to a designer on the manufacturability of the design. This paper describes the work done on assembly planning to date, plans for extending it, and its applications to agile manufacturing. In particular, we describe an agile manufacturing demonstration project underway at Sandia, and the role the Archimedes assembly planning system will play in it.