An expert system for design for robotic assembly

In recent years, due to the various advantages associated with automation and robotics, much work has been done in developing robotic systems for assembly operations. Since part design plays a major role in assembly, this paper deals with the design of parts for ease of robotic assembly. Considerable knowledge is available in the form of design for robotic assembly rules. In addition, a large amount of data is required for decisions regarding suitability of parts for robotic assembly. The implementation of design for robotic assembly rules would be much easier with the help of an expert system, which would guide the designer toward choosing the design alternative that can best facilitate ease of assembly from a robotic point of view. To this end, a prototype expert system for design for robotic assembly is developed and presented in this paper. The expert system was implemented as a production system, which consists of rules and Object-Attribute-Value (O-A-V) triplets to represent domain knowledge. In order to best utilize the domain specific knowledge, a state space search-based inference mechanism was employed. The implementation of the prototype system is illustrated with examples.