Fast Assembly Tolerance Inspection Method Using Feature-Based Adaptive Scale Reduction in Automatic Assembly Line

Enormous computation and long data processing time of the online tolerance inspection procedure has been a bottleneck in reducing the production cycle time of automatic assembly line. To reduce time consumption while maintaining accuracy, a fast assembly tolerance inspection method is proposed in this paper using scale-reduced models. First, the general part surface, input by a laser-scanned dense point cloud, is segmented through feature-based clustering. Shape variation estimation are designed to determine reduction ratios between clusters adaptively. Then, assembly simulation method is further advanced to utilize coarse point models with imbalanced density. Finally, numerical experiments are designed to estimate both static and dynamic assembly tolerances as results of tolerance inspection. A case study on a motion component of a rail material transporter shows that the proposed method could reduce 81% of the data processing time compared to traditional practice. The precision loss has minor influence on the inspection results because spatial positioning error is no more than 6% of tolerance interval and 18% of scanning resolution. Moreover, the proposed method has a comprehensive advantage of time and accuracy than two conventional point cloud simplification techniques based on iterative and clustering methods.