An integrative tool for manufacturability analysis of assemblies

Presents a modular computer system for manufacturability analysis of robot-made assemblies. In order to say if a specific design can be assembled in a specific robotic cell, designers must answer a number of questions about sequencing, stability, fixturing, grasping, motion planning and tool accessibility. Although several tools have been developed to compute some of the answers needed by designers, they have been developed in an isolated fashion making it hard to integrate their results. Each tool uses its own object models (which highlight some particular analysis features), sets of constraints, scale factors, and base units (inches, mm, etc.) leading to incompatibility problems when designers need to chain them, i.e. to use the output from one tool as the input for another one