Disassembly based assembly planning

Abstract

A robot motion planning technique for component assembly operations. Inputs to the motion planning technique include geometric models of the components being assembled, and initial and target configurations. The method begins at a tightly-constrained target or final configuration and plans in the direction of a loosely-constrained initial configuration. A randomly-sampled waypoint configuration is proposed, followed by a local search for feasible configurations which generates nodes that extend a path toward the initial configuration while sliding through the tightly-constrained region. The local search can be repeated multiple times for a given randomly-sampled configuration. When a completed path is found, the action sequence is trimmed to eliminate unnecessary extraneous motions in the loosely-constrained region. The disclosed method dramatically reduces the number of unproductive configurations evaluated and finds assembly solutions much faster in comparison to known tree-based motion planning methods.