MCAD2Sim: Towards Automatic Kinematic Joints Recognition

Developing production machines involves engineering processes to transform customer requirements into real machines. Commissioning, which is a bottleneck of the engineering processes, must be better addressed to improve the machine development. To do so, with the help of virtual machines, virtual commissioning (VC) can be performed before the real machine construction with several promising benefits. VC, however, seeks a method to automatically generate detailed virtual machines. The automatic model generation makes VC benefits valid. This paper presents a practical and automatic VC model generation method by applying the constraint-based algorithm to MCAD models. As a result, the static geometry in the models governs kinematic joints and parameters. The proposed MCAD2Sim workflow produces executable kinematic models in the COLLADA format, which is a part of AutomationML and widely used in the industrial automation domain. Furthermore, in this paper, the application of the entire workflow on a mechanical assembly is demonstrated. The results serve as a preliminary solution to the automatic VC model generation for more sophisticated real-world applications.

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