A hybrid approach for haptics-based intelligent assembly planning

Assembly planning is normally realized by automatic approach or interactive approach. Both of these methods have promising advantages, but they also have inevitable shortcomings. This article proposes a hybrid approach to combine automatic assembly planning and interactive assembly planning to generate optimal assembly sequence for industrial products. By defining a novel precedence constraint table to represent the assembly precedence relationships between components, the initial feasible assembly sequence can be generated by intelligent algorithm. This assembly sequence can be interactively simulated and evaluated in a haptics-based virtual environment. By simulating the multiple geometry constraints–based assembly process and assembly tool operation process, more practical precedence constraints and evaluation rules can be recognized, and more optimal assembly sequence can be re-planned. This is an iterative process until the best assembly sequence is obtained. The proposed hybrid approach can utilize the advantages of both methods, such as computer intelligence and human knowledge, and overcome their shortcomings. The generated results are more practical and flexible than tradi