Interactive path planning for haptic assistance in assembly tasks

This paper describes a global interactive framework including fast motion planning and a real-time guiding force for 3D CAD part assembly or disassembly tasks. To begin with, a collaborative architecture including the user and the planner is described. Then, for real-time purposes, a motion planner divided into two steps is presented: firstly, a preliminary workspace discretization is carried out with no time limitations at the beginning of the simulation, secondly, using this computed data, a second algorithm tries to find a collision-free path in real-time. Once the path has been found, haptic artificial guidance on the path is provided to the user. The user can subsequently influence the planner by following—or choosing not to follow—the path and automatically order new path research. The performance of this haptic assistance is measured on tests based on an ALSTOM power component assembly simulation.