CAMBRIDGE, MA—Engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed a new algorithm that can be applied to a wide range of complex real-world assemblies. It can be used to help eliminate the need to manually design assembly plans and instructions before sending parts to assembly lines.
Working in conjunction with Autodesk Research and Texas A&M University, MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) came up with a method to automatically assemble products. Their algorithm efficiently determines the order for multipart assembly, and then searches for a physically realistic motion path for each step.