Knowledge-based intelligent assembly planning system and its related key technologies

Assembly planning is a large scale and highly constrained combinatorial problem, including assembly sequence planning and assembly task planning. In order to reduce the computation complexity, this paper presents a knowledge-based approach to assembly planning. After analyzing the characteristics of connectors, typical knowledge base and standard knowledge base are built for assembly sequence planning. This research shows that the cases stored in typical or standard knowledge base can be applied to a given assembly planning problem. If similar or same structures in base do not give rise to useful plans for the provided structure, the system next generates feasible plans by geometric reasoning with the help of directed-connector knowledge. A novel approach for cooperative assembly task planning is proposed to improve the flexibility and reliability of the automated assembly system. By integrating geometric reasoning with knowledge-based reasoning, the computation complexity is reduced drastically and the assembly plans obtained are more feasible and practical.