Capacitance guided assembly

Capacitance guidance is shown to have a potential to provide a simple, direct, and well-understood means for part-to-part homing in some significant classes of assembly. Mutual capacitance homing is introduced, and results are shown for homing applied to die bonding of lightwave detectors, die-to-tape homing in tape automated bonding, and a simple variant of the peg-in-hole problem. Homing tends to reduce the complexity and precision requirements of the assembly machines and the assembled parts. Since homing is between mating surfaces, only they need be well defined. The large capture range of the method also reduces constraints on the initial configuration