Research on automated calculation of assembly direction for feature based assembly process planning

In order to get the components' assembly directions automatically for assembly planning, a feature based modeling system to establish products' assembly models is used, by means of specifying mating elements among components. This paper proposes a method for determining the assembly direction of components, which uses the direction of the axis vectors as components' assembly directions. The constructing coordinate systems of the mating feature geometric elements among components within the assembly model are extracted to get the axis vectors. If there exist more than one mating elements among components, intersection of the direction set determined by the mating element set among the components is used as components' assembly directions. This approach is used in assembly process planning, and it is proved to be capable of calculating assembly directions for all kinds of components.