Determining the assembly sequence from a 3-D model

Geometric modeling systems are rapidly replacing manual drafting techniques for defining the geometry of mechanical parts and assemblies. This makes possible the development of a variety of software tools to aid the designer in effective representation and evaluation of mechanical systems and assemblies (MSA's). The long term goal of our research is to address the question: Can the given MSA be assembled automatically with the given facilities? In order to accomplish our goal we need to develop techniques to model the Mechanical System/Assembly (MSA) and the available facilities. In this paper, we address the first part of our goals and develop a methodology to automatically determine the assembly sequence from a 3-D solid modeler description of the assembly. Our approach consists of automatically determining a set of assembly operations, through a disassembly procedure, that lead to the given assembly (MSA). We use the Noodles Solid Modeler, that has been developed at Carnegie Mellon, to describe the assembly. We have implemented our algorithm to determine the disassembly sequence on a SUN workstation in C language. We also describe our initial implementation through an example.