Haptics Aided Kinematic Assembly Modeling and Efficient Determination of Joint Ranges of Motion

Abstract This paper presents the development of a tool for the assembly and kinematic modeling of the tessellated objects. The tool addresses the issue of reducing the effort required to generate the kinematic models. The tool is capable of automatically ascertaining the type of kinematic pairing between two part models represented in STL format by detecting the compatible combination of features and determining the joint range of motion (ROM). The haptic interface is used to realistically simulate the assembly process and to determine the range of motion in 3D. The feature extraction algorithm uses a mix of curvature and surface normal based segmentation of the tessellated surfaces. The computation necessary for the geometry extraction and joint recognition has been decoupled from the complexity of the models by "Region of Interest" identification. A novel method for the determination of the ROM is proposed, wherein the recognized joint type information is used to restrict the computation necessary to the physically allowed degrees of freedom (DOF), unlike in the methods like configuration space, where, the computation needs to be done in 6-DOF space. Also, an efficient haptic rendering scheme for the simulation of the ROM has been proposed, which eliminates the need for the computationally intensive collision detection between the two parts