Disassembly sequencing using a motion planning approach

Our motion planning based approach treats the parts in the assembly as robots and operates in the composite configuration space of the parts´ individual configuration spaces. Randomized techniques inspired by recent motion planning methods are used to sample configurations in this space. Since typical assemblies consist of many parts, the corresponding composite C-spaces have high dimensionality. Also, since many important configurations for the disassembly sequence will involve closely packed parts, the disassembly problem suffers from the so-called narrow passage problem. We bias the sampling by computing potential movement directions based on the geometric characteristics of configurations known to be reachable from the assembled configuration. We construct a disassembly tree which is rooted at the starting assembled configuration. Our experimental results with several non-trivial puzzle-like assemblies show the potential of this approach.