Title: A System for Analyzing Automatic Assembly and Disassembly Operations*

Swee M. Mok., C-H. Wu and D. T. Lee

Sweek M. Mok#

Motorola Inc.
1301 East Algonquin Road	             
Schaumburg, Illinois 60196		 
e-mail: asm001@email.mot.com		 

C-H. Wu

Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering	      
Northwestern University		              
Evanston, IL 60208		       
e-mail: chwu@ece.nwu.edu 		        

D. T. Lee

Inst. of Information Science
Academia Sinica
Nankang, Taipei, Taiwan
e-mail: dtlee@iis.sinica.edu.tw


Abstract:

A system for evaluating products in their design phase has been developed. 
It is integrated into a CAD/CAM environment to calculate cost for 
assembling and disassembling parts. In previous work, a generic assembly 
and disassembly model was developed to represent operations required for 
product manufacturing and de-manufacturing. To be useful, the model 
requires a method for translating high-level instructions from product 
designers into low-level assembly and disassembly instructions. 
This paper presents a set of rules for accomplishing this task. The 
developed rules are used for manipulating strings representing parts and 
handlers in binary assembly and disassembly operations. 
A telephone assembly and disassembly simulation is used to illustrate the 
developed system.

Proceedings 2000 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, San Francisco, CA, April 2000.