Automatic Selective Disassembly and Path Planning for the Simulation of Maintenance Operations

Maintenance operations have a great impact in the security and life expectancy of any product. Virtual Reality can help reducing costs and design time by moving testing from physical mock-ups to virtual ones. VR allows the application of additional tools not possible in a physical mock-up. The increase in power of current computers allows their use not only for visualization and interaction but also for geometrical analysis and reasoning. These capabilities provide designers with tools that can increase their productivity. This paper proposes methods for the generation of selective disassembly plans and the generation of collision free trajectories in the context of interactive simulation of maintenance operations. These methods provide a design team with additional tools to asses a design, prior to the construction of physical mock-ups and, therefore, reducing the cost of a project