Autonomous system creates detailed human assembly plans from CAD designs
End-to-End Autonomous Generation of Human Assembly Plans
RoboticsGraphics
Summary
Making step-by-step assembly instructions from a computer design still usually requires engineers to carefully plan how parts fit together and how people will assemble them safely and efficiently. The authors developed an all-in-one method that takes only a 3D model made of parts and automatically generates a full assembly guide or a report explaining why assembly might fail. Their system uses a physics simulator to figure out the best order to assemble parts and AI language models to write manuals and choose tools. This approach can reduce robot-simulated assembly time by 35% and selects the right tools about 89% of the time, helping engineers speed up manufacturing preparation.
What this means in practice
- •For manufacturing engineers: Generate complete assembly instructions and tool lists automatically from product CAD models without extra metadata to speed up manufacturing planning.
- •For robotics integration teams: Use physics-simulation-based sequence plans to reduce robot assembly times by 35%, improving automated manufacturing performance.
Authors
Faustin Arion von Arx, Millicent Schlafly, Mark D. Fuge
Abstract
Turning a CAD design into an assembly plan is still largely done by hand, requiring engineers to reason about geometric feasibility, tool access, stability, and the ergonomics of human assembly. In this work, we encode long-established design for assembly (DfA) principles into a contained, end-to-end approach for generating assembly plans. Our approach takes only a mesh assembly and produces either a step-by-step assembly manual or a structured failure report, requiring no joint metadata, fastener annotations, or additional information. Four major components of a manufacturing plan are addressed autonomously: an assembly tool list, the assembly sequence and subassemblies, an assembly manual, and design feedback for improving assemblability. For determining the sequence plan, we systematically disassemble the object in a physics simulator and apply a cost function that encodes DfA principles. Manual generation, tool labelling, and assembly feedback rely primarily on multimodal large language models. Compared with a baseline that always removes the outermost part first from Tian et al., DfA-aware sequence planning reduces simulated assembly time, measured with a robot-arm assembly-time proxy, by 35% on 136 assemblies of 5 to 30 parts. The correct tool is selected for 88.6% of assembly steps. A vision-language model judge compares the generated manuals against ablated variants, identifying which page elements carry the information a reader needs. The presented approach and open-source code are available for use by engineers or AI agents looking to rapidly accelerate the creation of manufacturing plans for a given product design.