Assembly planning with intermediate states

The nonmonotonicity of assembly planning in different states is characterized and used to represent the three-dimensional geometric constraints of assembly operations in the form of blocking states. A subsumption mechanism based on the blocking states is used to reduce the search space so that a feasible plan can be efficiently found. An algorithm, NOMOL, which can generate nonmonotonic and nonlinear plans is presented and shown to be correct and complete.<
>