A computer-aided product redesign system for robotic assembly

Abstract

It is an established fact that a majority of a product's cost is determined by its design. Hence, effort should be directed to achieve a lower cost design without sacrificing the original functionality. A computer-aided product redesign system is proposed to provide help in generating assembly-oriented redesign by taking the robotic assembly constraints into consideration. The system operates in two phases: In the first phase, an objective evaluation of the input design is performed to determine whether there is a need for redesign. During the second phase, the focus is to aid the designer in searching for feasible design alternatives. Three quantitative measures have been proposed to evaluate the conformity of an input design to a list of DFA design guidelines. If the input design received a bad evaluation results on any of the three measures, a search for feasible redesign suggestions is initiated to derive suitable redesign suggestions.