Collaborative Research: Part Orienting Devices (PODs) - Novel Devices for Spatial Assembly Tasks

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The research objective of this collaborative research grant is to create the capability to design new and innovative devices for spatial assembly tasks. The research will produce a design methodology to create low degree of freedom machines, termed part-orienting devices, capable of producing spatial trajectories and reorientations. These part-orienting devices provide an alternative for solving assembly tasks that might otherwise require a robot or multiple single degree of freedom mechanisms. This research will comprehensively address the design of part-orienting devices including: (1) their kinematic synthesis, (2) the creation of an interactive computer-aided design tool, and (3) guidelines and tools for prototyping, actuating, and controlling these devices. The result of this research will be new theories and knowledge that will enable designers to create novel devices for spatial assembly tasks.If successful, this project will result in significant contributions to the state of the art in designing devices to perform automated spatial assembly tasks. Currently, as a product advances down an automated assembly line, both the product and its component piece parts are picked-up, reoriented, and inserted into subassemblies or fixtures. To reduce costs, assembly line designers try to keep these manipulations as simple as possible. Rotations about vertical or horizontal axes are preferred, often of 90 or 180 degrees. These tasks have a well-established set of efficient solutions. However, assembly tasks are often inherently 3-dimensional in nature and these spatial assembly tasks require more complex solutions. Moreover, additional constraints on the trajectory of the object (for example, collision avoidance or part meshing) further increase the complexity of these tasks. There exist two primary paradigms to finding solutions to such spatial assembly tasks. On the one end are complex and costly multi degree of freedom robotic systems and on the other is an ad hoc assemblage of simple one degree of freedom devices such as hinges and sliders. As a result of this research, designers will have another viable option, a completely new class of devices to realize spatial assembly tasks. These new part-orienting devices will yield reduced costs and increased reliability with respect to the existing technologies. Successful completion of this project will provide designers with a set of new methodologies, techniques, and tools to design and implement these new low degree of freedom part-orienting devices for spatial assembly tasks.