Automatic disassembly navigation for accurate virtual assembly path planning

Abstract

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to develop an automatic disassembly navigation approach for human interactions in the virtual environment to achieve accurate and effective virtual assembly path planning (VAPP). Design/methodology/approach – First, to avoid the error-prone human interactions, a constraint-based disassembly method is presented. Second, to automatically provide the next operable part(s), a disassembly navigation mechanism is adopted. Finally, the accurate assembly path planning can be obtained effectively and automatically by inversing the ordered accurate disassembly paths, which are obtained interactively in the virtual environment aided with the disassembly navigation matrix. Findings – The applications present that our approach can effectively avoid the error-prone interactive results and generate accurate and effective VAPP. Research limitations/implications – There are several works that could be conducted to make our approach more general in the future: to further study the basic disassembly direction deducing rules to make the process of determining disassembly direction totally automatic, to consider the hierarchy of the parts in virtual reality system and to consider the space for assembly/disassembly tools or operators. Originality/value – The approach has the following characteristics: a new approach to avoid the error-prone human interactions for accurate assembly path planning obtaining, a new constraint deducing method for determining the disassembly semantics automatically or semi-automatically is put forward and a new method for automatically identifying operable parts in VAPP is set forward.