Accelerating Micro-Assembly Process Implementation by a CAD-Based Control Interface

Given the strive towards miniaturised systems and the continual advancements in optical technologies, the importance of micro-assembly is steadily increasing. However, achieving assembly accuracy at the micrometer to sub-micron level demands specialised assembly strategies, hardware, and a specific knowledge base in engineering. This is why we are working on a holistic framework for intuitive microassembly programming to speed up process development and setup. Perceiving already existing solutions for intuitive and autonomous programming of industrial robots, the transferability of concepts is limited due to the specific boundary conditions in micro-assembly processes. While solutions have been presented for industrial robots that use an integration of CAD data for assembly process planning, these are not suitable for microassembly due to the influences of geometry tolerances of the involved components. As micro-assembly processes typically rely heavily on the utilisation of reference points and sensor-guided strategies, the robot trajectories/transformations have to be re-calculated for each individual assembly, which is not taken into account in current approaches. In this paper, we present a solution that enables an intuitive definition of teach-points and assembly mates with seamless information flow from CAD software (SolidWorks) to robot operating interface (ROS2), accelerating rapid prototyping in micro-assembly. As the assembly mates are known to the robot’s operating interface, our solution enables an automatic calculation of the assembly transformations, taking into account the geometrical tolerance of the components.