Almost all car wire harnesses are still manfuactured manually although it is both time consuming and error prone. In this report we describe a car wire harness CAD/CAM system that is able to automatically design and produce simple wire harnesses starting from CAD product model created by care designers. The system is written in PC-Prolog and runs in IBM PC AT and is based on a wire harness model represented by an object-oriented entity-relationship database. The wire harness model database is utilized in all automatic wire harness manu zfacturing design phases: in the wire harness lay-out design, in the pallet design, in the design of the pallet machining, and in the wire harness assembly design processes. An attempt has been made to automate all possible design and assembly phases. An automatically produced pallet, a special groove, wire protective tubes andan assembly robot together with some simple tools are used to automatically assemble wire harnesses. The key thing in our assembly process is a simple and flexible jig, which makes it relatively easy to automatize the process. This is one example of the general fact that automation of manual work usually means not only systems design and programming effort but also major changes in the process as well.
Automatic wire harness fabrication system prototype
Prototyp eines automatischen Drehtgeschirr-Fertigungssystems
Assembly Automation, Proc. of the 10th Int. Conf. ; Oct ; 255-262
1989
8 Seiten, 4 Bilder, 7 Quellen
Aufsatz (Konferenz)
Englisch