Understanding illustrative diagrams in an assembly manual

A method for obtaining assembly information from an illustrative diagram in an assembly manual is presented. The assembly information means the descriptions of structures of mechanical parts and assembly-constructive relations among various mechanical parts. The assembly-constructive relations include a union relation, which is the joint relation to be made between two mechanical parts that are indicated by an auxiliary line in an illustrative diagram, and an assembling order that specifies the sequence of assembling operations. A method that uses auxiliary lines in an illustrative diagram to obtain assembly information is proposed. Auxiliary lines make it easy to analyze the assembly-constructive relations and conjecture the structural details of a mechanical part. Some experimental results are given