Task planning of disassembling or assembling by intelligent robots

This study deals with task planning for disassembly/assembly of machine units by robots. This paper describes an algorithm for generating disassembly/assembly working, which is based on a data model of the assembly structure described by connective relations among parts. The algorithm can be divided into four stages. In the first stage, the disassembly sequence of machine units by robots is generated. In the second stage, the task is expanded to macro commands with task modules for disassembly. In the third stage, the macro command for assembly is changed by the macro command for disassembly. In the fourth stage, the macro command is expanded to the command in the work level. This algorithm is implemented as a knowledge-based system in Prolog. We have verified the effectiveness of this algorithm for experiments on disassembling/assembling machine units by robotic manipulators.