Assembly representations for capturing mating constraints and component kinematics

Design of electro-mechanical products involves the description of the constraints between a group of parts that allows them to behave in the desired fashion. This includes the description of the relative motion between components, fit requirements, and joint strength requirements. While some of these constraints are generated during the conceptual design stage, additional details are developed during the preliminary and detailed design stages. Any such information generated during a previous level of the design needs to be captured and propagated to the next lower level of design. In this paper, we identify important requirements for modeling electro-mechanical assemblies. These are: positioning and orienting components, verifying kinematic joints, propagating mating constraints, and capturing joint attributes. To support these modeling activities, we present assembly representations to capture the joint kinematics information and component degrees of freedom generated during the detailed design stage.