User Queries in Interactive Assembly Planning

This paper describes an interactive computer-aided assembly planning system that greatly reduces the human input required to construct assembly plans. The system takes a dual approach. First, most assembly operations are validated automatically from the CAD models of the as-sembly's parts using simple, fast techniques. Second, with each query the user is allowed to identify a set of parts that constrain a subassembly; the system uses this information to answer future queries automatically. This dual approach has proven quite powerful in experiments on real assemblies , reducing the number of queries by orders of magnitude over previous systems without sacriicing accuracy.