On the automatic generation of assembly plans

The author describes a level of assembly process-planning in which a task-level plan is generated directly from a model of the proposed assembly. This involves not only the generation of a series of operations to build the assembly but also the selection or design of an appropriate workspace with suitable fixtures and tools. The author introduces the assembly planning problem and describes an experimental assembly planning system which is capable of rapidly generating plans for most assemblies. The structure of the proposed assembly planner, XAP/1, is described and the performance of the XAP/1 is discussed