An Automatic Product Assembly Method Based on Assembly Feature Pair

Assembly design and simulation plays a very important role among all stages of product design, and is the fundamental guarantee to improve the assembly performance of product. However, in current assembly design and simulation process, the detailed assembly path and the assembly position and orientation of parts are all needed to be defined through human-computer interaction. Especially when a product contains quantities of parts, there will be so many human-computer interactions to do, which can greatly increase the burden of designers. For this reason, the purpose of this paper is to study an automatic assembly method to reduce the complexity in the definition of assembly design and simulation. Firstly, we studied the intrinsic relationship between the Assembly Feature Pair (AFP) and assembly behaviors of a part, and it’s our belief that the AFP pattern of one part determines its assembly behaviors. And then we proposed an automatic product assembly method based on AFP, by which one only need to enter or specify certain parameters to achieve the assembly design and simulation of a part. Finally, a simple toolset developed based on CATIA and DELMIA using this method was introduced, and an example was given to verify the validity of this approach.