Computer-aided Assembly Planning - Hardcover

Delchambre, Alain

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 041243170X ISBN 13: 9780412431708

Publisher: Springer, 1992

Synopsis

The assembly sector is one of the least automated in the manufacturing industry. Automation is essential if industrial companies are to be competitive in the future. In assembly, an integrated and flexible approach is needed because 75% of the applications are produced in small and medium batches. The methodologies developed in this book deal with the integration of the assembly process from the initial design of the product to its production. In such an integrated system, assembly planning is one of the most important features. A well-chosen assembly plan will reduce both the number of tool changes and the fixtures within the assembly cell. It will prevent the handling of unstable subassemblies, simplify the design of the robot grippers and reduce production costs. An automatic generator of assembly sequences can be an efficient aid to the designer. Whenever he or she modifies features of the product, the influence of these modifications can immediately be checked on the sequences. For small batch production, the automatic generation of assembly sequences is faster, more reliable and more cost-effective than manual generation. By using this latter method interesting sequences could be missed because of the combinatorial explosion of solutions. The main subjects treated in this book are as follows. 1. Presentation and classification of existing systems of automatic generation of assembly sequences. Automatic assembly planning is, indeed, a very recent research area and, in my experience, no systematic study has been carried out up to now.

About this title

Synopsis

The methodologies developed in this book deal with the integration of the assembly process from the initial design of the product through to production. In such an integrated system assembly planning is a key asset. The book begins with a classification of existing systems of automatic generation of assembly sequences. Automatic assembly planning is a recent research area and this is the first systematic study. A well chosen assembly plan will reduce the frequency of tool changes and the number of fixtures present in the assembly cell. It will also prevent the handling of unstable sub-assemblies, simplify the design of robot grippers and reduce production costs. Significantly the system described in the second half of the book has been implemented in the ROBCAD system, which is the most commonly used off-line programming system in the car manufacturing industry. Indeed, a fully-debugged prototype of the assembly planner presented in this book is now on-stream at Zanussi, Citroen, Telemecanique, KUKA and Fiat. Accordingly designers and manufacturing engineers, together with research and development engineers should find this book of interest.

Edition details

• Publisher: Springer
• Publication date: 1992
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 041243170X
• ISBN 13: 9780412431708
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 285