Technical issues related to motion planning represent complex challenges for the engineering taskforce in the virtual automobile design. Is the windscreen wiper motor properly designed to be mounted within the car? How easy will maintainability operations on the driver seat be? Which collision-free trajectory the spot welding robot should perform between two welding points? Those are typical questions where automotive OEMs and their Tier 1 suppliers require advanced path planning capabilities, either by product and service engineering (e.g. simulating mounting/dismounting component parts or forecasting accessibility issues for maintenance operations) or by process and manufacturing engineering (virtual production feasibility studies and robot path planning). With the current stage of the technology offered by PLM software providers, experienced operators need at least several hours to solve typical path planning scenarios, even with the help of efficient geometric tools like collision-checkers and automated local path computations. Difficult path planning problems such as those described above might even take up to several days to be solved. This presentation will adress the technological background of path planning theory on which innovative automatic path planning solution are based. The proposed approach benefits from the current active research work in the robot path planning area. It gathers and improves several probabilistic approaches within an integrated solution giving rise to an original parameter free algorithm. The resulting performance of this technology designed for and used in PLM applications will be highlighted by several practical use cases. Those will demonstrate the benefits of such a technology in the virtual automobil design by showing how to easily and rapidly generate, validate and document complex 3D trajectories in an easy and rapid manner. Efficiency will be evaluated in terms of computation time (several hours time saving on each mounting/dismounting simulation) and result quality (rapid assessment of different scenarios with differing tolerances/obstacles). Practically will be assessed by the possibility for non expert operators to easily use the solution without any parameter tuning. Then we will adress future directions for assembly path planning. First results in adding a virtual mannequin in the assembly process will be presented. The approach consists here in planning a path for the part alone and then using inverse kinematics operators to check the feasibility with the virtual human operator. Finally, we will propose new processes and methods which take into account Automatic Path Planning in the simulation activities of the virtual automobile design. The main benefits are on the one hand to reduce the likehood and frequency of costly design changes when detected too late and on the other hand to have a significant positive impact on the way the various engineering departmens (Design, DMU, Service, Manufacturing...) can work together much more efficiently by exchanging accurate design information and path planning simulation results.
Automatic path planning and its practical applications in the virtual automobile design
Automatische Bahnplanung und deren praktische Anwendungen im virtuellen Automobilentwurf
2005
8 Seiten, 9 Bilder
(nicht paginiert)
Aufsatz (Konferenz)
Englisch
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