Automatic assembly simulation of product in virtual environment based on interaction feature pair

In engineering practical implications, assembly simulation is a useful solution to test the planned assembly process and address assembly issues. However, it is usually carried out by time-consuming human–computer interaction, which causes a lot of unavoidable laborious work. Assembly simulation could exhibit the design intent in virtual environment through the interactions between parts. Unfortunately, the models which modeled with current constraint-based method cannot provide sufficient interaction information to support assembly simulation, and the needed information should be added by designers manually. To solve this problem, this paper introduces the concept of interaction feature pair (IFP) and presents an automatic assembly simulation method based on IFP. The proposed IFP provides a form that endues a part with the capability of knowing which part is going to interact with and how to interact. Based on IFP, the automatic assembly simulation is carried out in two steps: First, a graph-based method in presented to generate the interaction sequence, which provides the information that when and which feature should be mated during assembly. Then, the randomized motion planning is employed in the established C-space to find a collision-free path for each part, and the planning results in C-space are transferred into the movements of parts in simulation environment. With these two steps, the parts could interact with other parts under a certain interaction sequence, which automatically simulates the assembly of the product. Finally, an implementation sample is presented and the results show the effectiveness of the proposed method.