Design of an automated assembly environment

Abstract A design environment for acquisition, analysis and validation of information for automated mechanical assembly is proposed in this paper. The environment acts as a preprocessing step before the actual assembly operation. The working memory — consisting mainly of instances of component and subassembly data objects and a B-rep based structured face adjacency graph — is used to establish the assembly precedence relationship. The environment has been implemented in the object-oriented programming language Smalltalk-80. An object-based approach has been preferred to a procedural language because of increased modularity, data abstraction, and efficiency of the code. The hierarchical class (data type) structure of object-oriented programming has been used to define a hierarchical mating requirement module permitting knowledge inheritance from parent classes.