An Assembly Sequence Planning Method Using Ant Colony Algorithm for Arbitrary Placed Workpieces

This paper proposes a particular and effective online sequence planning method to help manipulators complete complex assembly tasks. In many existing studies, the workpiece is constrained to be placed at a particular initial position. To overcome this drawback, we combine the ant colony algorithm with a target detection algorithm, which could get the positions of the workpieces in real time for online sequence planning. In addition, the constraint and obstacle avoidance of different workpieces in the assembly process is also considered. According to the experiment results, an observation is found that the new method is superior to the general way in terms of efficiency and cost function value. Furthermore, the proposed method effectively solves different practical and feasible assembly sequence planning problems.