Motion planning for assembly mating operations

The authors introduce a planning system that relies on a novel approach which converts geometrical descriptions of assembly parts into potential field representations and then translates assembly operations into equivalent operations on the potential field representations. As a consequence, the system is able to quickly compute a path for the assembly motions and isolate those regions of the path where force/torque guided motions must be introduced to cope with possible collisions that may be caused by the prevailing uncertainties in the positions/orientations of the parts and their dimensions. This system has been experimentally verified using a Cincinnati Milacron T ^3-726 robot to assemble a gear box