Measuring the difficulty of assembly tasks from tool access information

Focusing on accessibility issues, this paper presents a qualitative measure of assembly task difficulty based on concepts from information theory. It is proposed that assembly task difficulty is directly proportional to the logarithm of the assembly task efficiency, this efficiency being a function of the average information content of the assembly task. Preliminary evaluation results are presented where the performance of this metric is tested. The results suggest that the new measure does a good job in capturing assembly difficulty as a function of assembly geometry