Assembly maintainability study with motion planning

Maintainability is an important issue in design where the accessibility of certain parts is determined for routine maintenance. In the past its study has been largely manual and labor intensive. Either by using physical mockup or computer animation with CAD models of a design, the task relies on a human to provide an access path for the part. In this paper, the authors present an automated approach to replace this manual process. By applying results from and developing extensions to research in motion planning and other fields, the authors demonstrate that an automated maintainability study system is feasible. The authors describe general extensions needed to adapt robotic motion planning techniques in maintainability studies. The authors show results from applying such a system to two classes of industrial application problems.