Design for Maintenance by Constrained Motion Planning

In designing an assembly product, maintainability is a crucial issue that determines whether certain parts can be accessed 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 human to provide an access path for the part. In this paper we present an automated system that replaces the traditional manual process. By applying results from and developing extensions to the motion planning research in robotics, we demonstrate that this automated system is an effective addition to CAD systems. We specifically describe the extension that accounts for special motion constraints imposed by designers. We also present experimental results from applying such a system to problems in industrial applications. The results show that such an system can not only reduce the turn-around time for checking maintainability of a product but also provide more accurate feedback to the designers on potential maintenance problems.