Assembly path planning by distance field based shrinking

Paper in proceeding, 2012

This paper presents a method to support dynamic packing in cases when no collision-free path can be found. The method, which is primarily based on path planning and shrinking of geometries, suggests a minimal geometry design change that results in a collision-free assembly path. A new method to shrink geometry based on adaptively sampled distance fields is suggested. Compared to previous work, the new method is less sensitive to input mesh quality. The method works directly on the triangle mesh and requires neither tetrahedralization nor calculation of a medial axis. The algorithm paired with a state of the art path planner has been applied to several industrial cases demonstrating that the proposed method can be used effectively for assembly verification during geometry design.